Hasta La Gadget!

Tim Cook kicked off today’s ‘Let’s talk iPhone‘ event by the numbers, mentioning that “the MacBook Pro and iMac are the number one best selling notebook and desktop in the United States.” Apparently the Mac platform grew by 23 percent over the last year, versus a four percent growth from the PC sector. Brandishing a chart tracing the trend back five years, Cook says that Apple is now pushing 60 million Mac users worldwide, leaving Cupertino just shy of owning a fourth of the personal computer market. “There are still 77 percent of people who are buying something else,” Cook said, “We have an incredibly high ceiling here. We have a long way to go.”

Tim Cook: Macbook Pro and iMac are the best selling notebook and desktop in the US originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 13:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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At the top of the list is the Soma Stand, a pyramid-shaped dock that folds up for portability. The accessory is mostly speaker, which faces outward, so sound isn’t blocked when you’ve got an iPad on the thing. The Soma Stand should be hitting shelves around October, running around €100 here in Europe.

The Soma Travel, meanwhile, works without the need batteries or wires, running directly off the power from your docked Apple device. XtremeMac claims that a docked iPhone 4 playing through the speakers will get about 34 hours of audio playback on a charge. As expected, the thing doesn’t get too loud, but it should do the trick for solo listening. The peripheral will run around €50 on its release.

The Tango Bar is a style-conscious sound bar with a silver grill that fits in quite nicely with the current generation iMac. The speaker pulls both audio and power from a single USB cable and outputs audio at ten watts. Like the Soma Stand, the Tango Bar will run around €100. Check out video of the Soma Stand after the break.

Continue reading XtremeMac showcases the Soma Stand, Soma Travel and more at IFA (video)

XtremeMac showcases the Soma Stand, Soma Travel and more at IFA (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 03 Sep 2011 18:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple’s keen on eliminating antenna woes in its products, even ones you may not even realize had antennas in the first place.

A new patent win for the Cupertino, California, giant illustrates a method for integrating a cellular antenna into MacBook and iMac keyboards, specifically by placing antennas under some keyboard keys.

According to Patently Apple, this is Apple’s fourth cellular-based MacBook related patent over the past year and the second to deal with disguising the cellular antenna itself. Could we be seeing a 3G or 4G-capable MacBook in the future?

The design and positioning of an antenna in a device is an important issue Apple is fully aware of.

Last summer, users discovered that the iPhone 4’s reception significantly dropped when they would touch one of its antenna bands.

In the past, MacBook Pro owners have had difficulty getting Bluetooth accessories, like the Magic Mouse, to play because of the Bluetooth antenna positioning in the notebook.

Recently, a 2007 MacBook Pro prototype with a Mag-safe-style rabbit-ear 3G antenna was racking up big bucks on eBay before the auction was pulled.

In the patent, the antenna is hidden under a few keyboard keys to improve its reception and transmission efficiencies.

When a user is not pressing the key, the antenna’s resonating element is about as far from the conductive metal housing as possible. So, ideally, the antenna would be positioned under a key that’s not used very often, like a Print Screen key (which the patent singles out despite the fact that Apple keyboards typically don’t even have a Print Screen key).

According to the diagrams, individual antennas would be placed under multiple keys and the device would use real-time information to decide which antenna is the best one to use. For instance, it could choose one that has a stronger signal than the others.

The patent doesn’t specify what kind of antenna would be placed on the keyboard. It could be Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, or it could be used for cellular communication or for data services (3G or 4G reception). The type of wireless signal the antenna would receive or transmit would depend on the configuration of the antenna.

So it could be that in iMac keyboards, the antennas would improve reception with Bluetooth peripherals, while in the MacBook keyboard, it would be used for Wi-Fi or cellular services. Then you wouldn’t even need to use your iPhone as a hotspot when you’re on the road.

Image: Patently Apple

It’s slow, and it doesn’t have Thunderbolt, but if you’re buying thousands at a time, the $1,000 iMac is a bargain

Apple has today made available a low-specced, slightly cheaper iMac to the educational market. The 21.5-inch model costs $1000, $200 less than the regular entry-level iMac of the same size.

However, for that relatively small saving you get a lot less Mac. The processor is a dual-core Core i3 running at 3.1GHz, against the quad-core Core i5 at 2.5GHz, RAM is just 2GB instead of 4GB, the hard drive is a pathetic 250GB (Vs. 500GB) and the graphics — which use the same AMD Radeon HD 6750M processor — shrink their memory from 512MB to 256MB.

It also lacks a Thunderbolt port.

The educational iMac does get a keyboard with a numeric keypad, although you’re stuck with the Magic Mouse — there’s no free option for a trackpad.

For individual users, the $200 saving is clearly not worth it in exchange for last year’s tech — you’d be much better off buying a refurb from Apple and getting a bigger discount. For schools and colleges who don’t necessarily need to latest and best, and which buy in bulk, a $200 saving on, say, 50 machines is a lot of cash.

iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2011) – Technical Specifications [Apple via Mac Rumors]

See Also:

• How the iPhone Could Reboot Education
• Colleges Dream of Paperless, iPad-centric Education
• What's the Worst Apple Product Ever?

Apple’s giving us a patent application peek into its post-PC future, and it looks like hard keys will be so 2008. The recently revealed filing shows off a virtual, flat keyboard concept for Cupertino’s line of non-iOS products that flirts with metal, plastic and glass form factors. Using a combination of piezoelectrics, haptic feedback and acoustic pulse recognition, these prospective designs will be able to detect your finger-pounding surface input. If you’re the fast-typing kind, you’re probably wondering how your digits will recognize the keys sight unseen. Well, there’s a few workarounds for that. In its metal and plastic iterations, Jobs and co. plan to stamp or micro-perforate the layout into place, while their glass counterpart would receive a graphical overlay. The application also promises an LED-lit display for hard to see conditions and the inclusion of capactive sensors to enable multi-touch functions, so you avoid e.e. cummings-style emails. Of course, applications aren’t necessarily indicative of a surefire product, but those interested in tickling their imagination can give the source link a look.

Apple patent application takes the hard keys out of the keyboard, promises a flat surface solution originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Jul 2011 22:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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