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The reviews are in: Everybody loves the new MacBook Air’s battery

Erica Ogg — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:16:01 +0000

There was only one new laptop launched at WWDC this year and there wasn’t very much new about it. The 2013 MacBook Air looks basically the same as it has for a few years: same thin silver package, same rounded corners, same clicky black keys. But people who’ve been using the new Airs — the 11-inch, starting at $999 and the 13-inch starting at $1,099 — say don’t let that sameness fool you. There’s a huge difference that you can’t see: super-long battery life.

Here are the main conclusions from the best reviews out there:

The Verge spent time with the 13-inch Air and puts it this way: “13 hours and 29 minutes. That’s all you really need to know — that’s how long the new MacBook Air running Safari lasted running The Verge Battery Test, which cycles through a series of websites and images at 65 percent brightness.”
Fortune tried out the 11-inch version and was quite happy though has one quibble: ”A week with the new 11-inch MacBook Air has convinced me that Apple’s hardware upgrade—minor as it may seem—will still be enough to convince some to upgrade or buy one for the first time based on excellent battery life alone. It doesn’t achieve 9 hours in-between charges with everyday use, but 8.5 hours of Web browsing is pretty close. And while I wish Apple would offer a build-to-order option for a higher-resolution screen—the current 1,366 x 768 resolution is really starting to feel cramped—it’s a small omission on an otherwise excellent device.”
CNET is effusive about the battery (but strangely knocks it for not having a touchscreen): “It’s easy to say that this new version of the 13-inch MacBook Air is a modest step forward, with no physical changes to the exterior, and still no higher-res display, touch screen, or HDMI port. The battery life is a very big deal, however, and when you couple that with a $100 price cut on the base model, down to $1,099, the 13-inch MacBook Air is, despite not being the newest design on the block, still one of the most universally useful laptops you can buy.”
PC Magazine got the 13-inch to last 15.5 hours, but also noted this: “The downside of the lower-clocked processor is that the MacBook Air is a bit slower on the multimedia benchmark tests (Handbrake and Photoshop CS6), where it lags the Windows systems with faster-clocked Core i5 processors. On the flipside, the MacBook Air is still two to four times faster than Intel Atom-powered Windows 8 slate tablets on the Handbrake test, and those Atom-powered tablets can’t run the Photoshop CS6 test at all.”

For our take on the announcements made at WWDC 2013, be sure to listen to the special edition of The GigaOM Show podcast:

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Paper iPad app gets $15M for more productivity software, services — and hardware

Erica Ogg — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:00:07 +0000

Would you buy hardware from an iPad journal company? FiftyThree, the company behind one of the most beloved (and successful) iPad apps, Paper, is betting on it. And so is an impressive group of investors: on Tuesday the company plans to reveal it has nailed down a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Bright Capital, Highline Ventures, SV Angel and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey.

Paper arrived in March 2012 and managed to wow a lot of iPad users immediately with its beautiful design. The app enabled users to create digital watercolors, drawings paintings, journals, outlines and more on the relatively large screen of the iPad. It was chosen as the best iPad app of the year by Apple at the end of last year.

It has also been one of the top-grossing apps: it regularly appears in the top 10 iPad apps that bring in the most money.

To date, Paper has 80 million downloads and the company says 80 million projects have been created with the app.

“Since we launched Paper we’ve been profitable,” co-founder and CEO Georg Petschnigg told me. ”But for us this [funding] is about taking business to the next level.”

For FiftyThree, that next level is about adding to its 22-person team (that’s split about even among designers and engineers in offices in Seattle and New York City). It’s also about more than one app. Petschnigg foresees expanding to an entire suite of software, services and hardware.

FiftyThree’s team is actually full of veterans of the hardware industry — people who worked on projects like Microsoft’s Xbox, Kinect and Courier, as well as Sonos — so it will be interesting to see what they come up with. An obvious pairing with the app would be a Paper-branded stylus, but Petschnigg wouldn’t elaborate on what kind of hardware they have in mind — or when it will arrive.

“We’ve been focused on iPad there, but the next part we’re working on is services that will start to answer the question of how people work together and collaborate,” he added. Without giving any more detail, he seemed to imply that collaboration means among several different platforms, not just Apple’s tablet.

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Apple sanctions iPhone game controllers: a first clue as to how they’ll look

Erica Ogg — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 16:20:58 +0000

iOS is already the leading mobile gaming platform. But come this fall Apple should cement that lead by giving iOS app makers permission to create sanctioned devices that will turn its devices into actual game controllers. Kotaku has the first image of one of those devices on its blog today.

The slightly blurry image shows a handheld controller that fits around the iPhone like a case, with the directional pad and buttons that are standard with most controllers on either end of the device. Kotaku won’t say where it got the image, but says that it’s of a Logitech device that fits an iPhone 5.

(Incidentally, if this is a Logitech case planned for introduction when a new iPhone is announced later this fall, the fact that it’s the same size as an iPhone 5 indicates that the new model will have the same form factor — more of an iPhone 5S upgrade than an iPhone 6.)

Apple hasn’t completely detailed its vision for the iPhone and iPod touch as gaming devices just yet. At WWDC last week it briefly mentioned a new API for turning devices into a game controller and an official MFi designation for some yet-to-be-named hardware makers. But come fall, when a new iPhone is likely to be announced, Apple should have more to share about how the controllers will work and interact with other devices like Apple TV via AirPlay and which hardware makers will be involved.

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So what if Apple copies your app? Get to work, like Sunrise did

Erica Ogg — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 15:00:23 +0000

The Apple iOS app most badly in need of an upgrade was Calendar — and it’s getting one in iOS 7. And some of the coolest and most useful features in the new Calendar were, as I noted earlier, clearly borrowed from some third-party calendaring apps. One of those that provided some inspiration is Sunrise, and the small New York-based team is fighting back by almost immediately launching a new set of features that iOS Calendar doesn’t have (yet).

On Monday morning, version 1.4 of Sunrise hit the iOS App Store and with it comes even more useful integration features that help make Sunrise an easy-to-use, all-encompassing, dynamic snapshot of your day.

In addition to integrating Facebook, Google Calendar and LinkedIn into the app (and local weather and birthdays) Sunrise is adding two more: Foursquare and Crunchbase.

The Foursquare integration is no surprise: Sunrise founders Pierre Valade and Jeremy Le Van are former Foursquare designers. What this will mean for Sunrise users is that check-ins to the Foursquare app on your iPhone will show up retroactively on your Sunrise calendar. So if you ended up at a great late-night spot you can’t remember the name of — but you checked in on Foursquare — if you look back at Sunrise for that day, you’ll see where you were and when.

The Crunchbase integration is aimed at business users. The database of companies will be available right inside the app. So if you’ve entered the name of the company you’re meeting with in Sunrise it will call up additional data about that person/company without forcing you to leave the app.

There’s also going to be a slightly better way of displaying Google Maps information: instead of selecting your meeting’s location and getting pushed out to the Google Maps app, you can now see the location on a map right inside Sunrise.

It’s a small update overall, but I like how quickly the team responded to Apple’s notable advance in native calendaring.

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Apple got more than 4,000 user data requests from US government in last six months

Erica Ogg — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 13:01:18 +0000

Very early Monday morning, Apple joined other internet companies explaining how often the U.S. government requests the personal data of its users, for national security reasons and others.

Like Microsoft and Facebook, Apple says it sought permission from the federal government to publicly disclose how often it receives requests for user data related to national security. Apple says “We have been authorized to share some of that data, and we are providing it here in the interest of transparency.”

From Apple’s press release:

From December 1, 2012 to May 31, 2013, Apple received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from U.S. law enforcement for customer data. Between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices were specified in those requests, which came from federal, state and local authorities and included both criminal investigations and national security matters.

Notably, Apple received about half the requests that Facebook and Microsoft did. What’s not said is how often Apple complies — reports indicate that Facebook, for example, complied in some way with about 79 percent of them.

Apple says the most common type of information the government asks for has to do with stolen property (likely iPhones, iPads and other Apple devices) and locating missing people — kidnapped children, Alzheimer’s patients or suicide prevention.

Apple doesn’t characterize how often or not national security played into these requests over the past six months. But it does say that it looks at each request in order to provide only the “narrowest” set of data related to it.

The company also noted the type of data it cannot share: iMessage texts and FaceTime calls. Both are encrypted forms of messaging and “Apple cannot decrypt that data.”

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5 takeaways for iOS developers from WWDC 2013

Erica Ogg — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 15:00:14 +0000

Even though Apple’s lead in mobile hardware has eroded with the rise of Samsung, third-party apps have become more important than ever. The biggest apps and developers still think iOS first — but fewer and fewer of them are remaining iOS-only. Apple’s platform and App Store provided others with a whole new livelihood, but the company is relying more than ever on third-party app makers to keep its platform ahead of the competition.

As such, WWDC was the time for developers to feel the love from Apple. But we also got to see some pretty striking changes to the now 6-year-old iOS that those developers will now have to digest. Here are the five main things to know.

$10 billion paid out to developers

Apple said it paid $5 billion to developers in the last year alone in revenue from App Store sales. And that’s great: but the reality is that the dynamics of the App Store have changed rapidly over the past few years. With the rise of free-mium/pay-to-play, paid apps aren’t making nearly as much revenue as they used to for developers. The question a lot of developers seem to be struggling with right now is whether they should go free with in-app purchase or simply start embracing higher prices for apps.

50 billion total downloads

There are 900,000 apps available — and if you divide that 50 billion evenly among each app, that would be about 56,000 downloads apiece. But that’s obviously not how it works: all apps are not created equal. There are apps that have millions of downloads and some that have 10. And Apple continues to have its work cut out for it finding and removing apps that are gaming the system or using spammy tactics to artificially inflate download numbers.

You have a lot of work ahead of you

But you already know this. iOS 7 is different in many ways from its predecessors — as we’ve covered extensively — and it’s going to require a larger effort to figure out how your app needs to adapt to the new OS than the usual yearly upgrade. Apps that don’t look like they belong in the new iOS 7 world will look outdated and put themselves at a disadvantage — current users may abandon an app and potential users may not download it in the first place if the experience looks inconsistent with the environment it’s in.

But, as the image above shows, the effort will be worth it. Apple has trained its iOS users well and they upgrade quickly to the latest version of the operating system — much faster than Android users (who are held back by carriers and manufacturers).

The bummer for iPad app makers is they will have even less time than iPhone developers to figure out how to optimize their app for iOS 7. The iPad beta version of the software is still several weeks away from being released.

Get ready for an app approval logjam

Did you notice your iOS app update taking longer to get approved than normal this week? Some developers are already starting to see this and the beta has been out for less than a week. As developers figure out how they will incorporate the new look — not to mention new features, services and APIs into their apps to get ready for the official release of iOS in the fall — that is likely going to get worse unless Apple decides to staff up its app review team. With such a big overhaul there’s a lot less chance some app makers will sit this change out than in the past with relatively less dramatic upgrades.

It’s probably not as bad as you think

Everyone and their mom seems to think they can do a better job at re-imagining iOS 7 than Jony Ive and his Human Interface team. Which is kind of hilarious, when you think about it.

Yes, it’s bright and yes it’s different, but this is technology: things change. Just like the when the internet recoils in horror at Facebook design changes, we’ll all eventually get used to this very big change. (Or most of us, anyways.) Plus, there’s little chance of going back.

It’s true that there are some changes that are a bit off-putting, and plenty of details and elements that are not quite right yet — as several designers have told me. But remember: it’s been eight months since iOS 6 came out and iOS 7 is a pre-release beta. It’s a good bet that what Apple unveiled Monday is going to be tweaked and adjusted as needed over the next few months.

And even after it’s put on a new iPhone and shipped to the masses, that’s still not the end: the iOS 7 revealed this week, just like all Apple software, will continue to evolve.

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Developer interest in iOS 7 beta is twice as high as iOS 6 beta

Erica Ogg — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 19:35:28 +0000

Apple released the unfinished version of iOS 7 into the clutches of developers on Monday, and rather unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of interest in it. After all, it contains the most radical update to the design and look of iOS since the software was introduced in 2007.

Below is a graph from Chitika, which used impressions on its ad network in the U.S. and Canada to determine the share of web traffic that is being generated by devices running iOS 7. Chitika found that after three days, the iOS 7 beta is already running on 0.22 percent of mobile devices. That number should only continue to rise.

Chitika says that 0.22 percent three days later is twice as high as the amount of interest in the iOS 6 beta more than a month after its release in 2012.

Notably however, the number of impressions generated by iOS 7 beta users over our network has continued to increase. For comparison, while we previously observed users of the iOS 6 beta generating 0.11% of all iOS traffic following the third beta release on July 16, 2012, iOS 7 users are already responsible for 0.22% of all North American Web traffic from compatible devices two days after its initial release. However, it is worth noting that the third iteration of the iOS 6 beta was available on some iPad models, specifically version two and above.

You might think 0.22 percent isn’t a very big number — and relative to the 600 million iOS devices sold, it’s not. But we’re talking about a very specific and limited group that has downloaded this: Apple’s registered developers who’ve paid for the iOS SDK (and possibly some who were able to get it on the grey market). And there’s a remarkable amount of interest/fear of what Apple has done — and a lot of work they’re going to have to do to get ready for its official release in a few months.

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Like it or not, all iOS 6 apps will need to be upgraded for iOS 7

Erica Ogg — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 16:36:50 +0000

The reaction to the grand overhaul of iOS 7 has not been universally warm and fuzzy. Some are happy with it, while others are kind of freaked out by it. But, as the U.K.-based app developer group Entropy Labs astutely pointed out on its blog (via Daring Fireball), none of that matters: iOS 7 is here to stay, and if you don’t upgrade your current apps by the fall, you’re the one that’s going to lose out.

Everything about the look of iOS 7 has been tweaked or massively changed. Textures, colors, menus, buttons, navigation arrows, keyboards, dials, icons, everything will need to be updated to blend seamlessly with Apple’s new chosen design. Apple isn’t forcing this, but it’s in all developers’ best interest: because when you put an iOS 6-designed app next to an iOS 7-ready one, the difference will be incredibly stark — and not in a good way.

As Entropy says:

Remember what non-retina enabled Apps looked like when the iPhone 4 was released? Well, this has the potential to be worse – much worse. And remember when many people said that iPhone-only Apps would look “just fine” on the iPad when blown up to 2X scale. Yeah, that argument didn’t last long.

Simply put, pre-iOS 7 Apps running on the new OS stick out like a sore thumb - looking aged, clunky, and well…just ancient.

The deadline for this upgrade isn’t specific, but Apple says the official iOS 7 release will be sometime this fall.

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Apple snuck a Google Now-ish feature into iOS 7 called “Today”

Erica Ogg — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 23:53:47 +0000

Apple did a lot of borrowing for the latest release of its mobile operating system, and MacRumors found something in iOS 7 that will seem awfully familiar to Google Now users. It’s a series of notifications that appear under a tab called Today — the feature can show users the current weather for places they may be going, alert them to traffic before their regular commute, and, like a personal assistant, tell them what their schedule looks like for the morning.

Alerts appear under a Today tab in the Notifications Center, which you can turn on in the Settings app. The data, according to some info that MacRumors found, comes from different sources within iOS. Traffic information about frequently visited locations is gathered if the user turns on the Frequent Locations feature under Location Services.

Today, at least in its current beta incarnation and as currently understood, is much less robust than Google Now, which does much more than provide traffic, weather and scheduling. Google Now will not only check traffic related to events on a user’s Google Calendar, it can alert them to everything from flight delays to sports scores, local sightseeing recommendations and package delivery notifications. All of that information is gleaned from users’ activities within other Google services. Google Now has been available on the iOS platform as part of the Google Search app since April.

But even if Today isn’t as full-featured, the ambition seems similar: to anticipate information for iOS users before they need it. Anticipatory computing is still in its infancy. But with Google and Apple, with one of the most ubiquitous mobile operating systems and one of the most ubiquitous mobile computing devices in the world, are the best candidates of moving anticipatory tech into the mainstream.

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Cellular iPads consume 3x the mobile data as smartphones

Erica Ogg — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 22:12:47 +0000

Since the iPad arrived more than three years ago, Wi-Fi-only versions of the tablet have been far more popular than cellular-capable models. But things may finally be swinging in a different direction. Data use coming from iPads has grown four times in just the last six months, according to data gleaned from mobile network operators by U.K.-based analytics software company Actix. And for the first time, there are two different iPad models among the top 10 most data-hungry devices, which has always only had smartphones on it.

It’s not the latest 4G-capable iPad that’s eating up all this data, though, it’s older 3G models: the iPad 2 and iPad 3 are now No. 6 and No. 7, respectively, on this list, says Actix; the rest are smartphones. There has never been a tablet, much less two, on the list of the most mobile data-hungry devices before. Actix gets this information from software it runs on the networks of eight carriers: one European, one Middle Eastern, two American and four based in the Asia Pacific region.

Why is this number suddenly growing just since the end of 2012, when the iPad 2 has been around since early 2011 and the iPad 3 since early 2012? Mobile broadband subscriptions grew 45 percent faster in the first three months of 2013 than a year earlier, according to a recently published study by Ericsson.

It could be customers are taking advantage of more flexible mobile plans, like the shared data plans AT&T and Verizon now offer. Rather than buy a separate subscription for their tablets, customers can attach to them to their smartphone plans, encouraging customers to connect their iPads to cellular networks instead of just relying on Wi-Fi connectivity.

But it could also be a sign of the continued popularity of Apple’s older model iPads. Though cellular models are more expensive, older models get sold at a discount. When the fourth-generation iPad debuted in late 2012, Apple started selling the 16GB iPad 2 + Cellular for $529 (down from the price of $629). The iPad 3, however, was discontinued.

Another thing propelling iPads up the list, Actix says, is that Apple’s tablets are consuming three times more mobile data than the average smartphone.

If this trend holds out, it could mean a windfall for carriers who can sell bigger buckets of data to tablet users, but the opposite could be true for consumers, who will end up footing those bills.

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