Month: September 2019

CUPERTINO, Calif.—Apple’s iPad lineup has been in considerable flux of late. Just in the past year, Apple totally overhauled both iPad Pro sizes, introduced a new iPad Air based on the chassis of the prior iPad Pro, and relaunched the iPad mini (albeit without much in the way of modern hardware to recommend it).

Today, the company’s representatives took the stage to announce new iPhones, but they also revealed a major update to the entry-level iPad.

The biggest news here is that the screen is bigger, at 10.2 inches. That’s thanks to a significant bezel reduction, among other tweaks. The other major change is the addition of Smart Keyboard support, using the same Smart Keyboard connector as the 2019 iPad Air. Of course, since this iPad starts at $329 and the Smart Keyboard costs $159, you’re looking at spending almost half the cost of your tablet just to get a keyboard for it.

I tried the keyboard and, well, it’s identical to the one people are using with the iPad Air right now. So there’s not much new to say. It’s good for a tablet keyboard, but it won’t hold a candle to a good desktop or laptop keyboard.

The new iPad feels almost exactly the same in your hands as the 2019 iPad Air; it’s only slightly different in a couple of minor ways. This iPad has a 10.2-inch display, whereas the iPad Air comes in at 10.5 inches; the difference is the bezels. There are the same number of pixels-per-inch as you see in the iPad Air display; it’s just a little less display.

The iPad Air is slightly thinner—just 0.05 inches less. Perhaps most importantly, the Air has an A12 chip, whereas this iPad has the A10 from a couple of years ago. There’s a dramatic performance difference between those two CPUs/GPUs, especially for augmented reality applications and games. But the A10 is still fast enough for most light browsing and content-consumption activities.

It’s the same chip as was in last year’s entry-level iPad, though, so don’t expect improved performance if you do a one-year upgrade here. And it still just supports the first-generation Apple Pencil.

If you look at Apple’s website promoting the seventh-generation iPad, you’ll find that most of the pitch is about iPadOS, a new tablet-specific branch of Apple’s iOS mobile operating system due at the end of this month. It changes the home screen, adds a bunch of new multitasking features, attempts to make working with text less nightmarish, and more. We’ll review that later this year, and we wrote about it when it was first unveiled this summer.

But the very, very short version is that it’s more powerful and useful for sure. But the device is still not going to replace a laptop for anyone looking to get serious work done.

The new iPad comes in 32GB and 128GB variants and ships starting September 30. You can pre-order it now, and it starts at $329 for most people or $299 for education customers.

Hints pulled from iOS 13 code have already shown signs of the rumored AR headset that Apple is supposedly working on, but now there’s clearer proof than ever. Developer Steve Troughton-Smith points out a readme in a new release that explains to employees how they can run the augmented reality apps on an iPhone without using the actual headset.

9to5Mac’s Guilherme Rambo showed how the iOS 13.0 gold master and iOS 13.1 beta releases contain Apple’s “StarBoard” system shell to run AR apps as well. According to Smith, the code suggests that rendering could be handled on the iPhone itself, and the use of an additional gamepad/motion control device.

Apple’s plans for augmented or virtual reality went unmentioned during today’s iPhone event, along with other rumored announcements like a new Apple TV or ultra-wideband location Tags. Still, the leftover notes suggest that it could’ve been a late scratch, or perhaps that something new is, as rumored, around the corner for next year.

What did you think of the iPhone 11 keynote? The word on social media appears to be “meh”, largely because the iPhone 11 appears to be going through its Gillette razor blade period:

“What will we do this year, guys?”

“Put another camera in there!”

But while the iPhone’s clearly going through a protracted period of incremental improvement there were still plenty of interesting things to take away from Tim Cook and company’s talk.

We saw the future of the iPad, worked out what the Apple Watch is actually for and discovered that nobody in the organisation or the theater appears to have a dirty mind: when we were told that the new iPad “is a great one-handed typing experience” nobody laughed.

Nobody! And as if that wasn’t bad enough, nobody booed when Apple tried to persuade us that the portmanteau “slofie” – short for slo-mo selfie – was a thing that should exist. Let’s pretend that it never happened and never speak of it again.

Here are the six key things you might not have heard from the Apple keynote.

1. The iPad is a PC. Oh yes it is

“We have never been more excited about the future of iPad,” Tim Cook said, unveiling the latest version of what we think is Apple’s best-value product: the entry-level iPad. It’s less than half the price of an iPhone but it certainly isn’t half the device.

How you compare your products to says a lot about where you think your product is headed – so when Apple explicitly compared its latest, slightly bigger iPad to the current best-selling Windows PC in the US, the message was clear. Thanks in no small part to iPadOS – which, among many other things, brings mouse control to the iPad – the iPad is intended to be a fully-featured PC rival, not just a really big iPhone. And this little iPad has got a smart connector too, so you can add one of Apple’s smart keyboards for an even more PC-like experience.

2. Apple knows what the Apple Watch is for now

The original Apple Watch was a bit like the original iPad: Apple had made a thing and didn’t really have any idea what that thing was for, so it released it to see what people would end up doing with it. And like the iPad, after a few iterations Apple now has a much clearer idea of what the Watch is and what it isn’t.

As the testimonials and keynote demonstrated, the Apple Watch is no longer intended to be a fully featured do-everything device like an iPhone or an iPad, a wrist-based communicator, garage door opener and dog translator; other than pinging you when you need to be pinged about things it’s for tracking your vital signs whether that’s to stop you dying, helping you win races or helping with medical research.

In other words it’s a kind of hyper-powered, hyper-fashionable Fitbit, and that’s no bad thing. It’s not bad for business, either, given the incredible amounts of money ageing baby boomers have to spend on health tech.

Oh, and it’s finally able to show the time all the time. It just took five generations.

3. Apple wants all of your money, all of the time

Quite a lot of the event was dedicated to services and subscriptions because that’s where a lot of Apple’s income is coming from now. It all adds up. Five bucks for your Apple television subscription. Another five bucks for Apple Arcade. And of course there’s your iCloud storage, because the free tier is still hilariously stingy. Oh, and then there’s your Newsstand subscriptions and your app subscriptions, of which Apple takes a cut too, and the Apple Card you’ll be paying for them with.

Apple’s business model used to be that it would sell you frighteningly expensive hardware at huge profit margins and that was the end of it; now, it seems the model is to sell you frighteningly expensive hardware at huge profit margins and then sell you lots and lots of subscriptions and services on top of it.

4. Apple TV+ probably won’t be very good

And we don’t just mean it’ll be rubbish in the UK, as Apple’s TV offerings traditionally are, and where history is likely to repeat in the short term at least. We mean that the signs from the keynote weren’t entirely encouraging.

Yes, offering a free year’s subscription could mean Apple’s simply using its deep pockets to bring its TV service to everyone at a very low price, but Apple TV+ was already priced below its key rivals Disney and Netflix. If you were a really rich company and you were really confident in the quality of your content, wouldn’t you just spend your money on ads showing how great it was? You don’t see Apple giving you a free iPad for a year, after all.

5. Apple’s doing diversity right

The tech industry can be terribly pale, male and stale, and tech presentations can be particularly terrible examples of that: all too often the only women and people of colour you’ll see are the models in their big-budget ads.

So it’s good to see Apple walking the walk as well as talking the talk, with a relatively diverse line-up of presenters from within the organisation. Was it perfect? Nope. But it wasn’t an endless parade of middle-aged white guys either, and the same diversity was apparent in the camera demos. This stuff matters.

6. Brexit’s borked tech for the Brits (and it’s probably going to get worse)

For years we’ve been able to translate Apple’s US prices into UK ones, because they’ve been identical: five nine nine USD worked out at five nine nine GBP.

Not any more.

The new iPad is $329 in American money but it’s £349 in British pounds. Confusingly the price difference isn’t across the range, so for example the new Apple Watch is a straight dollar-pound conversion, but it’s clearly the shape of things to come and things may well get worse if the Pound continues its decline against the Dollar.

With multiple makers of smartphones launching expensive high-end 5G smartphones this year, it was a matter of time before more reasonably priced 5G handsets emerge. Samsung is among the first companies to introduce a 5G-enabled smartphone that promises not to break the bank. In addition to faster networks support, the Samsung A90 offers a bunch of first-class features, including an advanced SoC as well as premium imaging capabilities.

Equipped with a 6.7-inch Super AMOLED display featuring a 2400×1080 resolution and a raindrop selfie camera module, the Galaxy A90 5G is based on Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon 855 SoC accompanied by 6 or 8 GB of LPDDRX as well as 128 GB of NAND flash storage (expandable using a microSD card). Just like other Qualcomm-based 5G smartphones, the Galaxy A90 5G uses Qualcomm’s X50 modem. This is the same SoC and modem that power Samsung’s Galaxy S10 5G handset, so from performance and connectivity perspectives, the Galaxy A90 5G promises to behave just like the range-topping model.

Imaging capabilities of the Galaxy A90 5G include a 48 MP main camera, an 8 MP ultrawide lens, and a 5 MP depth sensor. Meanwhile, a 32 MP module is used for selfies.

One of the interesting selling points of the Galaxy A90 5G is support for Samsung’s DeX platform that enables desktop-like experience on Android-based devices (e.g., open up multiple windows, re-size windows, drag and drop content, etc.) when they connected to a PC display or a TV. Of course, proper DeX experience will require an external keyboard and mouse.

Other notable features of Samsung’s Galaxy A90 5G are a 4,500 mAh battery, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0, a USB 2.0 Type-C port for data and charging, stereo speakers, Dolby Atmos support for USB-C headsets, a fingerprint reader, and facial recognition.

Samsung’s Galaxy A90 5G will be released in black and white in South Korea on September 4. Exact price is unknown, but one of the rumours suggests that it will be below $1000. The launch in other countries will likely follow shortly as operators will certainly be interested in starting sales of a reasonably priced 5G handset in time for the holiday season.

There’s a new USB spec in town and it brings faster speeds with it. Announced earlier this year, the USB-IF has signed off on the latest standard. Of course, USB 3.2 is far from commonplace so it is going to be a while before you see USB 4 compatible products.

So what’s new with USB 4?

USB 4 doubles the peak data transfer rate from 20Gbps to 40Gbps. It uses the same dual-lane architecture as USB 3.2 but doubles individual lane-transfer speeds to 20Gbps to reach a cumulative 40Gbps. You will need USB 4 certified cables to take advantage of these speeds. Of course, Thunderbolt 3 has supported 40Gbps transfer for a while now, and that brings us to the next bit.

The standard has backward compatibility all the way to USB 2.0, but the bigger addition is Thunderbolt 3 support. Since USB 4 is built on top of Intel’s Thunderbolt 3, future hardware should be able to make use of those higher speeds on older Thunderbolt-compatible devices.

While it has been possible to use a single cable for transmitting data and video since the first USB 3 standard rolled out, the implementation has been fairly iffy. The USB 4 spec seeks to solve this through smarter and more efficient routing. Expect greater and more sustained transfer speeds even while using a high-resolution external display with your laptop.

Finally, the USB 4 spec brings with it support for 100W charging over the USB Power Delivery standard. We expect more details at the upcoming USB Developer Days conference.

When should I expect USB 4 hardware?

Going by how slow the uptake has been on USB 3.2, you shouldn’t expect USB 4 hardware any time soon. In fact, the latest Snapdragon 855 chipset still doesn’t support USB 3.2. By all estimates, the earliest you should expect hardware supporting the new standard would be in the second half of 2020. You will, of course, need compatible peripherals as well to make use of those blazing fast speeds.