Apple just finished unveiling its all-new iMac design that we previously unveiled leading up to the event. We told you at the time that Apple is shipping two refreshed models of its 21-inch and 27-inch iMacs, but we would unfortunately likely see delays on at least some models. Apple decided to take the wraps off its refreshed iMacs today, but as we predicted, the models will not ship right away.
Apple did not confirm during the unveiling, but it has now listed the new iMacs on its website with availability dates listed as November for the 21-inch model and December for the 27-inch model. You will no longer be able to get your hands on the last-generation iMac, except through Apple’s refurbished section. Hopefully Apple can get enough of these out before the holidays, especially the 27-inch model that will not ship until weeks before.
Also of note for the new iMacs is the fact that the 21-inch model comes with no user accessible RAM slots, while the 27-inch model has 4 slots accessible from the back of the machine. The 21-inch model is configurable up to 16GB through Apple, but the 4 slots on the 27-inch can handle up to 32GB:
The 21.5-inch iMac comes with 8GB of memory and can be configured online with 16GB. On the 27-inchiMac, 8GB of memory comes standard, and you can upgrade to 16GB or 32GB. Configure and buy your iMac at the Apple Online Store and it will arrive with the memory already installed. Or add more memory to the 27-inch model yourself by popping open the easy-to-access memory panel on the back.
Apple just updated its website following the iPad mini media event with some new videos for the device as well as specs and updated product pages for the new 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro and other products. You can also now view a video of the keynote speech via a link from the Apple.com homepage.
Apple also put its store back online with many of the new products it just unveiled, and it appears to have tweaked its online store with a slightly new design. Expand Expanding Close
The authors of blog Apple.Pro have posted a photo of what appears to be the shell for the upcoming tweaked third-generation iPad with a Lightning port. No other changes appear to be shown in this image. That is in line with expectations of this being a very minor refresh. Apple.Pro is known to have a fairly reliable track record when it comes to sharing images of parts for upcoming Apple products.
Further pushing toward the idea of a plugin-free internet, Apple has issued an update to Java for OS X that removes the Java applet plugin. Attempting to use a Java applet through any OS X web browser will now prompt users to download the latest version directly from Java maker Oracle.
This is not the first time Apple has stopped shipping a specific browser plugin with their computers. With OS X Lion, users discovered that their Macs no longer came with Adobe’s oft-derided Flash Player plugin due to its instability and security issues. Apple has long held browser plugins in contempt, especially following the success of iOS, which hasn’t supported browser plugins at all in the past six years.
Earlier, we posted new iPad SKUs showing Apple is likely launching 24 new models of the device. It is still to be determined whether the four variants in the SKUs include updated iPad 3 models with Lightning connectors or four iPad mini variants. Today, we also get a hint at what looks like updated 21-inch and 27-inch iMac models from the same SKUs.
Listed as “D7” and “D8” in the SKUs above, we see two refreshed models. They are presumably for the 21-inch and 27-inch variants that Apple currently sells. We have recently heard reports that Apple is planning to introduce new iMacs alongside what reports claimed were images of the refreshed iMacs’ internals.
There have also been rumors that Apple will begin selling the refreshed iMacs on Oct. 24—one day after the rumored date of the iPad mini launch event. We are not sure Apple will begin shipping any of the new models on Oct. 24, but we have heard at least some varieties will not ship at launch. However, the SKUs above are pretty good evidence that refreshed models are on the way. We will have more on that in the near future. Expand Expanding Close
Anyone who has ever misplaced an iPad and felt a sudden urge of panic —or better yet, anyone who has ever watched an iPad’s battery drain without access to power while on a long trip— can now rejoice, as there is a solution to both problems in one, nifty case.
Wireless NRG developed a renewable charging resource for the iPad by simply converting the sun’s rays, indoor lights, and practically any other luminescent substance into a perpetual stream of free energy. The high-end, portable charging case, dubbed “KudoCase,” launched earlier this summer for $199.95 with a slew of innovative accessories. But that’s not all…it responds to whistling. If your iPad is ever lost at a friend’s house, just whistle. The KudoCase will set off an alarm. Yeah, I know—awesome.
Anyway, enough jibber-jabber—check out the hands-on review below.
The iCloud outage, which began Tuesday and affected roughly 2 percent of Apple’s 200 Million iCloud users, now appears to be over. However, some iCloud users wrote to tell us that Apple just dumped all of their email into the Inbox with 12/31/69 dates and jumbled Subject lines. One reader’s email now looks like this:
.
An excerpt from his frustrated email is below. I hate to say this about a company that makes the best hardware and OS software in the world, but it would be hard to trust my junkmail to iCloud at this point.
HP’s Spectre One comes with accessories that look and act almost identical to Apple counterparts including the wireless keyboard, trackpad and mouse. The screen looks like a Cinema Display with HP pasted over the Apple. The only difference is the back (which few will see).
Perhaps manufacturers are learning the wrong lesson from Samsung. Although Engadget did not notice (or mention) any resemblance beyond the “Magic Trackpad style,” just about every commenter did. Update: Engadget Editor Tim Stevens says it was too obvious to mention:
Apple quietly dropped the prices on refurbished MacBook Airs last night by up to $120. Notables above are 2010 releases of the 11.6″ MacBook Air model with options of 128GB SSD or 4GB of RAM. Apple refurbished items are virtually indistinguishable from new items and come with the same 1 year AppleCare warranty. All refurbished Macs purchased at Apple are also eligible for the OS X Mountain Lion Up-to-Date Program.
Update: Commenters pointed out the update is not going well…so proceed with caution.
As Roxio’s Toast moves from burning DVDs and BluRays to a “media toolkit” that allows easy social sharing and converting of audio/video (as well as burning/archiving), it is also getting updated with new Macintosh features. Today, Roxio’s Optical media burning software goes to 11.1 and adds the following updates:
Toast has been fully Cocoa-ized – Hundreds of changes and fixes implemented as a part of this effort
Added OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion compatibility
Added support for recording to 100GB and 128GB BDXL media
Implemented Gatekeeper Support
Web-Video feature improvements
Requires using Safari to capture web-video
YouTube users may need to OPT OUT of HTML5 Trial
Mountain Lion users will need to update to 10.8.1 or later to publish video to YouTube
As you can probably see, we made some big changes to the look and feel of the site this weekend. The new design was put together by Get10Up.com and we want to thank Taylor, Jake and the rest of the team for getting it all into place and making this happen.
We did not hate the old 9to5 design, but we wanted to start from scratch on so many different aspects due to Retina devices proliferating and the move toward mobile. Some improvements you will notice:
1. All of the design elements are optimized for Retina displays. In addition, we are able to display images and video over 700 pixels wide in this new format (1,400 pixel Retina). This allows us to bring imagery and video clarity that has always been hard to deliver (without “open in a new window”). Our CMS/Hosting partners WordPress VIP are also jumping on the Retina train with new additions that will allow us to deliver Retina quality imagery without compromising load times for those without Retina displays.
2. Mobile. We have been through a bunch of mobile designs before, which we were not particularly fond of (and neither were you!), but last year we gave up and decided we were going to start fresh. If you are reading this on a mobile device, you will hopefully like the changes at hand. Desktop users: Have a look…or just resize your browser and notice how the responsive desktop elements fall away into a mobile experience.
3. Load times. Even with Retina images and design elements, we wanted to bring load times down. The team at Get10Up was able to pull this off with their mastery of WordPress, CSS and some front- and back-end “magic.” No matter what device you are using, you should notice significant page load time improvement.
4. We are a blog and proud of it. Recently, many of the bigger blogs attempted to change formats from their roots in the reverse chronological format into something like a magazine or newspaper. We played with the idea, but we found that we really, truly enjoy the traditional blog format whether we’re on an iPhone, an iPad, or our Macs. With that said, we also enlarged our Top 4 Feature Stories to spread across the page. In addition, we are improving our “asides” as smaller, title-only lines on the front page. We love these for small, quick bits of news and hope you do too.
5. Hooray for Authors! We gave a little more space to Mark, Jordan, Elyse, Jake, Mike, and all of our contributors who do a great job of delivering Apple news, rumors, reviews, and opinion to you first. You will see their faces on stories so you will know who is delivering your news.
6. Sharing buttons: Nowhere and everywhere. We labored over the decision about whether to include sharing buttons. On one hand, they are very helpful when you want to share a post with your social networks. On the other hand, they take valuable load time, are ugly, and they get in the way of the flow of content.
We think we came up with an elegant compromise: There are no social buttons anywhere on the site, but sharing buttons will load with counts (now including Pinterest!) if you hit the ‘share’ text on top or ‘share this’ text on the bottom of a post. They are a little harder to find, but we think you will have no problem sharing if you should decide.
7. You! As you’ve probably noticed (see @inadarei above), we’ve been embedding a lot of reader Tweet reactions to posts recently. Besides just calling out great comments, embedding allows us to share the conversation. If you have something to add, include the post URL and cc @9to5mac on the tweet for consideration.
We also pushed updates to 9to5Google.comand 9to5Toys.com, which should unite the experience. 9to5Forums.comand our commenting engine also got a big pickup this week from VanillaForums. It improves voting/order of comments, spam removal, and a host of smaller improvements. 9to5Forums will move to the new design shortly.
We really hope you like the update and it improves your experience at 9to5 (more on the way too). We love bringing you your favorite technology news!
NYC Resistor recently found an old Macintosh SE on a Brooklyn street and noticed an interesting easter egg buried in the ROMs after doing some digital digging.
While digging through dumps generated from the Apple Mac SE ROM images we noticed that there was a large amount of non-code, non-audio data. Adam Mayer tested different stride widths and found that at 67 bytes (536 pixels across) there appeared to be some sort of image data that clearly was a picture of people. The rest of the image was skewed and distorted, so we knew that it wasn’t stored as an uncompressed bitmap.
After some investigation, we were able to decode the scrambled mess above and turn it into the full image with a hidden message from “Thu, Nov 20, 1986“:
So…an Apple team apparently hid four of its own images in the Motorola 68000-era Macintosh nearly 26 years ago. Cool. NYC Resistor is now calling upon readers to identify the mystery employees. Go to the hacker blog to also learn more about the discovery’s engineering-side.
Parallels just announced the availability of its next generation of virtualization software for the Mac. Although details are scant at this point, it is safe to assume it is optimized for Mountain Lion and Windows 8.
Notable: If you purchase/purchased Parallels 7 after July 25 (Mountain Lion’s release date), you are eligible for a free copy of Parallels 8. Not too shabby.
For a limited time, Walmart.com is offering a $100 downloadable Apple iTunes/App Store gift card for just $80. These popular gift cards can be used on iBooks, iTunes Movies, Videos, music, Mac and iOS Apps. We’ve heard these do work internationally if paid for with a US source and used in the US iTunes/App Stores.
You are basically getting 20% off every Apple media purchase you make. Also makes a great gift…we imagine.
Today, in a post on his Google+ page, Google software engineer and original Macintosh co-creator Andy Hertzfeld pointed us to a rare commercial created for the first Macintosh in the fall of 1983 by ad agency Chiat-Day. Hertzfeld noted Apple ultimately decided not to air the commercial that featured interviews with members of the Macintosh design team, because “Apple deemed it too self-congratulatory.” It did, however, make its way to dealers as a promotional video at the time. Featured in the video are snippets of interviews with Andy Hertzfeld, George Crow, Bill Atkinson, Mike Murray, and Burrell Smith.
We’ve received word from AppleSeed testers that the first 10.8.1 Betas are on the way.
There has been some concern over excessive battery drain in recent days as well as Apple’s curious new “Save as” behavior which also overwrites the current version which will hopefully be addressed in upcoming releases.
It appears that Apple is offering $50 off across the board yielding savings of 6-10% depending on the original price. This is the first time Apple has offered the 3rd generation iPad refurbished at the Apple Store.
Apple’s refurbished iPads get a new battery and encasement and come with the same 1 year warranty as new iPads. Expand Expanding Close
MacTech Conference 2012: Sessions, Speakers and Details
World-class speakers, amazing sessions; pre-registration ends August 31st
WESTLAKE VILLAGE, Calif., Aug. 6, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — MacTech Conference for Apple Developers and IT Pros, October 17-19, 2012 in Los Angeles, has released its main speaker and session list, as well as many details of the conference. The event: a three-day, information-packed event that will have sessions and activities throughout the day and evening. This immersive conference is hotel-based, giving attendees the opportunity to not only learn from the best, but also to meet new people and spend time with their peers as well. Information about the conference is at http://www.mactech.com/conference
“Our speaker page contains a list of some of the amazing people that will present and be in attendance at MacTech Conference 2012 (but expect a surprise guest or two). Some of the incredible topics that will be covered are now listed at http://www.mactech.com/conference/sessions ,” said Ed Marczak, Sessions Chair and Executive Editor, MacTech Magazine.
MacTech Conference is a multi-track event with a focus on both programming/development, as well as IT/Enterprise. Sessions will focus on both desktop and mobile with appropriate levels of attention paid to the Mac and iOS. Check out the speaker and topic list ( http://www.mactech.com/conference/sessions ) for specific sessions and speaker list.
The event will be held Wednesday through Friday, October 17-19. The conference kicks off at 10am on Wednesday and is packed with sessions using MacTech’s well-established running order format. The evenings are filled with special activities and events designed specifically to have fun and give attendees an opportunity to form bonds with their peers and meet new people.
“At past MacTech Conferences, between 98-100% of attendees said that they would recommend the Conference. We’ve been working hard to once again live up to expectations with a great environment, world-class speakers, incredible sessions, and fun activities. Edward R. Marczak (Conference Sessions Chair and IT Track Sessions Chair) and Steven Troughton-Smith (Developer Track Sessions Chair) have created a world-class line-up of world-class talent,” Neil Ticktin, Editor-in-Chief/Publisher of MacTech Magazine, said.
MacTech Conference is priced economically at $999 (pre-registration pricing) including all meals, a MacTech Magazine subscription, a schedule packed full of sessions, exclusive entertainment, and more. Registration is far ahead of last year — and guest rooms at the hotel are almost sold out. Pre-registration ends on August 31st, and attendees can still save $300 off the on-site registration price. Register at http://www.mactech.com/conference/register
A limited number of partial and full student scholarships are available. See http://www.mactech.com/conference/student for more information.
Available on a first-come, first-served basis, MacTech Conference attendees get a special rate of just $184 per night, which includes Internet access. The Sheraton is a quality venue with rooms that typically run $229.00 or more per night, plus tax, and with Internet access available for an additional fee. Available on a first-come, first-served basis, MacTech Conference attendees get a special rate.
Those interested in one of the many sponsorship offerings, see the details at http://www.mactech.com/conference/sponsorship
Remember, Pre-Registration pricing ends in just a couple of weeks: August 31st. http://www.mactech.com/conference/register
About MacTech Magazine
Established in 1984, MacTech Magazine is the only monthly magazine focused on Apple at the technical level. Each month, MacTech and MacTech.com is read by 150,000 technical Macintosh users in over 175 countries, from network administrators to programmers, from solution providers to Enterprise, and in general anyone that’s interested in the Macintosh beyond the user level.
If you’re interested in getting under the hood of your Mac, if you want to know how to make things happen inside the box, you should be reading MacTech Magazine. Contact the magazine. Toll-free: 877-MACTECH, International: 805-494-9797, custservice@mactech.com, http://www.mactech.com
Contact:
Neil TicktinMacTech Magazinemarketing@mactech.com805-494-9797
This press release was issued through eReleases® Press Release Distribution. For more information, visit http://www.ereleases.com .
SOURCE MacTech Magazine
Copyright (C) 2012 PR Newswire. All rights reserved
A discussion thread on Apple’s support forum appeared last night from a user who claimed all of his iCloud content disappeared without warning. A further glimpse at the following comments revealed the same situation occurred for a number of iCloud users.
One commenter, npascual, said an Apple support representative “acknowledged last night’s outage,” and then suggested the user “turn off all iCloud-related services on my iPad (Mail, Contacts, Calendars, etc.), wait a bit then turn them back on.” The representative apparently indicated “everything would return after a short period of re-synching.” However, npascual noted it had been a few hours since the call without any repair.
UPDATE: Well, Apple is owning up to the problem, according to its System Status page, but the company is neglecting to give an explanation as to what is happening.
We broke the news late last year that Apple was working on a Hulu Plus app for Apple TV. Unfortunately, getting the app to the Apple TV was a political issue, not a technical one.
We’ve gotten word that inside Apple there are Apple TVs running the Hulu Plus app natively. The app is feature complete and ready to roll out to Apple TV users on current builds. In fact, it has been ready for at least a month and development is now on hold.
While there are no technical issues standing in the way of the Hulu Plus release on Apple TV, there appear to be some political ones. At some level at Apple, there appears to be some consideration that the Hulu Plus app could eat into iTunes TV sales on the Apple TV. Where Netflix tends to run older programming, iTunes is the Apple TV’s only outlet for current TV programming….
Today, our Apple TVs are lighting up with some Hulu Plus goodness. If you do not see it, a quick reboot will bring it up. Hulu offers a free one-week trial here. Pictures directly from the screen are below.
Update: Hulu has updated its blog with the news and provided an unnecessary instructional video (Above).
We told you yesterday about the Trojan named “Crisis“, also being referred to as “OSX/Morcut-A”, discovered for OS X, but it is considered low risk for users. Today, we get some more details about the trojan with security company Sophos explaining the Morcut Malware features code for controlling the following:
The malware appears to have been specifically created with spying on the user as its goal. There have not been any reported cases of infected users, though, so the threat is still considered low risk.
Following this morning’s launch of 10.8 Mountain Lion on the Mac App Store, Apple just launched a separate app as an OS X Server for Mountain Lion. It allows users to add sever functionality to the OS for $20. It is definitely a significant price drop from the $49 Lion server and the $500 or so it cost to add the functionality before that.
OS X Server is the next generation of Apple’s award winning server software. Designed for OS X and iOS devices, OS X Server makes it easy to share files, schedule meetings, synchronize contacts, host your own website, publish wikis, configure Macs, iPhones and iPads, remotely access your network, and more.
Server is now an application you can add to Mountain Lion right from the Mac App Store. Anyone can quickly and easily turn a Mac running Mountain Lion into a server that’s perfect for home offices, businesses, schools, and hobbyists alike.
Today, at Apple’s Q3 2012 earnings call, the company provided some updates on numbers for the quarter. Apple Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer shared iCloud is now up to 150 million users. Last time Apple checked in in April, it reported 125 million users for Q2. This marks an increase of 25 million users during Q3. Hit up the links below for all of the updates from today’s conference call:
