T3 India

T3.com

New MacBook Pro 2016: everything you could possibly want to know about Apple’s newest MBP

by

We’ll be honest. We didn’t have high expectations. The MacBook Pro has been largely untouched for four years, and the rumors and leaks indicated that while a refresh was coming, it wouldn’t be jaw-dropping. We’d love to say that Apple confounded our expectations – but did they?

The short answer is “hmmmmm”, and the long answer is “hmmmmmmmmmm”. There’s little doubt that the new MacBook Pro is the best laptop Apple has ever shipped, with some superb feats of engineering and some really interesting ideas. But given the lack of an update to the iMac and Mac Pro, is the new MacBook Pro range enough to mollify the increasingly unhappy pro market when Microsoft has just dropped the extremely impressive Surface Studio with Surface Dial?

The 2016 MacBook Pro was launched on the 25th anniversary of Apple’s first notebook, the first Powerbook. After a lengthy recap of the various notebook innovations Apple delivered over those 25 years, Tim Cook showed us this generation’s big idea: a retina multi-touch panel, which Apple calls the Touch Bar. It’s not just a menu bar but a timeline and scrubber for video or photos or music, a slider for track volume, the favourites buttons for your web browser, autocorrect for your typing or anything else app developers fancy using it for.

You can also customise it to have your own commands on it instead of the standard system controls. It’s very clever, and of course it includes TouchID too. That boosts security, makes user switching a one-tap affair and enables you to use Apple Pay online. It’s an interesting alternative to the touch-based notebooks we’ve seen from Windows manufacturers; Apple clearly believes that you should keep your hands on the keyboard instead.

The 13-inch MacBook Pro is just 14.9mm thick – a difference of 17% compared to the previous MacBook Pro, and it’s lighter too. So is the 15-inch model, which is now 15.5mm compared to the 18mm of its predecessor.

Both devices get a new Force Touch trackpad that’s twice the size of the previous version, a new version of the butterfly keyboard we first saw in the most recent MacBook, and the widely leaked Touch Bar that replaces the function keys.

The 15-inch is 67% brighter, has 67% better contrast and displays 25% more colours than the outgoing model. Battery life is a claimed 10 hours.

Inside the Mac there’s a quad-core Intel Core i7 with 2133MHz memory, Radeon Pro graphics using AMD’s Polaris architecture and a faster SSD of up to 2TB with 50% faster performance. Apple reckons that the cooling system is quieter and the speakers much louder than before.

The 13-inch has a choice of dual-core Intel Core i5/i7 with Intel Iris graphics, and again the SSD is twice as fast as before.

There’s a second 13-inch, designed for MacBook Air customers. It doesn’t have the Touch Bar and has two, not four, Thunderbolt 3 ports.

Both Touch Bar versions of the MacBook Pro have four Thunderbolt 3 ports, delivering 40Gb/s bandwidth, 10Gb/s USB 3.1 and with each port able to choose between being a power port, a USB port, a Thunderbolt port… that’s really clever, and genuinely useful to pros who need to connect all kinds of devices. Apple demoed the 15-inch model running two 5K displays and two RAID storage arrays simultaneously. Nobody used the phrase “desktop replacement”, but that’s what many people were thinking during the keynote.

It’s worth noting that while the iPhone has dumped the headphone jack for a Lightning connection, that hasn’t happened with the MacBook Pro: it has a headphone jack but no Lightning port. The MagSafe is gone, as is the SD card slot.

Apple will have three variants up for sale with the entry-level having no Touch Bar. Apple will confirm the pricing and availability for the Indian market soon.

Filed Under: PC

iPhone 7 vs iPhone 6S: what’s new?

by

The iPhone 7 has landed, and this time, it’s not a rumour. And it turns out, the most-awaited phone of the year is pretty much what we expected, to be honest. The headphone jack has joined the floppy and CD drives in Apple’s bin, the design has been tweaked and both camera and battery have been improved dramatically.

The iPhone 7 may well be the best ‘non-Plus’ iPhone ever made, but is it the best iPhone for you now that the 6S gets more storage too? Let’s find out.

iPhone 7 vs iPhone 6S design

The iPhone 6S wasn’t a dramatic departure from the iPhone 6, although its less slippery aluminium case made it considerably less likely to fly out of your hands. It followed the usual tick-tock approach where the non-S models would change the overall design and the following year’s S models would tinker with the internals. It’s still a very good-looking phone, although over-familiarity may have dulled its appeal somewhat.

This year, though, it seems that Apple has tocked where it would normally tick: the iPhone 7 is clearly a refinement of the existing design. It’s almost an iPhone 6S-S. The antenna bands are nearly invisible and the new glossy Jet Black option looks great, but visually, the iPhone looks very like its predecessor – which is perhaps why the glossy version isn’t available in the smallest storage option, so that rich early adopters can differentiate themselves from us plebs.

There are some key changes though. There’s IP67 water- and dust-resistance, the speakers are now stereo and the headphone jack is gone; you do get a Lightning adapter for your existing phones but that means you can’t charge while you listen, and it makes iPhones less usable for musicians too. The Home button has been redesigned: it’s solid state, force-sensitive and its revamped taptic engine can be accessed by third-party apps for special effects. It’s a shame that when Apple ditched the headphone jack it stuck with Lightning instead of the industry standard USB-C.

iPhone 7 vs iPhone 6S display

The display in the iPhone 6S is a 4.7-inch IPS LCD delivering 1,334 x 720 pixels at 326ppi. It’s crisp and clear but falls well behind the pixel density of AMOLED Android rivals, and at around 65 per cent screen-to-body ratio, the former doesn’t dominate the way Android flagships do. But unlike most rivals the screen has 3D Touch, which enables you to force-press icons to bring up extra options.

The iPhone 7 display looks identical. Once again it’s an IPS LCD, but while Apple has boosted its brightness by 25 percent and given it a wide colour gamut, it’s the same resolution and pixel density. It’s pretty good and nicer than its predecessor, but it’s lagging behind some of the better Android displays.

iPhone 7 vs iPhone 6S camera

The iPhone 6S has a 12MP, f/2.2 camera with phase detection autofocus, but not optical image stabilisation, which is reserved for the 6S Plus. It’s capable of 2160p video at 30fps. The 5MP front-facing camera is capable of 1080p video at 30fps.

Sadly, the new dual-camera setup is limited to the iPhone 7 Plus, but the camera in the iPhone 7 has some useful improvements. It’s stabilised for starters, and the aperture has been improved to f/1.8 for better low-light performance. There’s a new lens, a faster sensor and the front-facing camera has been upped to 7MP with stabilisation. Apple hasn’t detailed the video specs yet, which suggests they’ll be the same as before, but the stabilisation extends to Live Photos and we assume it’ll work on video too.

iPhone 7 vs iPhone 6S specs and software

Apple designs its own silicon, and in the iPhone 6S, its A9 dual-core 1.8GHz processor has six-core PowerVR GT7600 graphics. There’s 2GB of RAM and a choice of 16, 64 or 128GB of storage. Additionally, there’s no microSD card to add any more.

For the iPhone 7, storage is up – 32, 128 or 256GB, unless you want the glossy black one; that’s limited to 128 or 256GB – and the processor is the new Apple A10 Fusion. It’s a four-core processor with two high-performance cores and two high-efficiency cores, with the former delivering a promised 40 per cent performance boost over the A9 chip in the previous iPhone.

The iPhone 6S shipped with iOS 9, but it’ll get the iOS 10 upgrade in a week or so and most likely the next two iOSes too. The 7 gets iOS 10 from the get-go.

Phone 7 vs iPhone 6S battery

The iPhone 6S battery is small by flagship standards, with just 1,715mAh. Apple claims 240 hours of standby, 14 hours of talk time or 50 hours of music.

While the specs for the new battery haven’t been disclosed, Apple has made some big promises: it says that the new iPhone 7 will get the same battery life as the iPhone 6S Plus, whose battery was significantly bigger. Expect two more hours per day out of the iPhone 7 than from the iPhone 6S Plus.

iPhone 7 vs iPhone 6S features

In addition to 3D Touch, the iPhone 6S also has Live Photos, Apple’s way of turning photographs into little video clips. There’s Siri and iCloud too, although Apple persists with its infuriating limit of 5GB per iCloud account rather than 5GB per device.

iPhone 7 vs iPhone 6S: verdict

Is the iPhone 7 a good phone? Yes, it is. Is it worth upgrading from the iPhone 6S? Probably not, unless battery life is really causing you problems. We know there’s a more exciting iPhone planned for next year, so it’s probably sensible to hang on for that.

That’s not to say the iPhone 7 is a bad phone, or a bad buy: if you’re in the market for a new phone there’s a lot here to like. It’s faster, lasts longer, has a better display and a better camera than the iPhone 6S. But the improvements are incremental rather than dramatic. Especially if you have headphones or an amp that needs the 3.5mm jack.

macOS Sierra: 10 new features that make it better than Windows

by

Apple has unveiled macOS Sierra, the latest and greatest version of the Mac operating system. Developers get it today and there’s a public beta in July, with the final version shipping for free in the Autumn. As with previous OS X releases the annual update introduces a few interesting new features without radically changing the entire OS, and that’s the case here – but the new features Apple has demonstrated are well worth upgrading for. Here are ten things that make Sierra better than Windows.

1. It’s got a nicer name

We knew it was coming thanks to references in official Apple documents: the OS X name is no more, and the Mac OS is back to being called macOS again – but this time without a capital letter, just like iOS, tvOS and watchOS. As an internal project it was codenamed Fuji, but the final release will be called macOS Sierra.

2. Auto Unlock it with your Apple Watch

This one’s been on the wishlist for a while: automatic unlocking of your Mac. If like us you’d rather not have to type, retype and retype your password again when you open your MacBook, all you need is an Apple Watch. Your Mac will sense your Watch and when you open the lid (or tap a key, mouse or trackpad on the desktop) it’ll log you in automatically. Windows 10 has this with Windows Hello, which doesn’t require additional hardware, but we like the extra peace of mind that comes from requiring the Watch.

3. Copy text on your iPhone, Paste it on your Mac

Like Auto Unlock, the new Universal Clipboard uses Apple’s Continuity to make macOS and iOS devices work together. This one’s simple and really useful: if you copy something to the clipboard on your iPhone or iPad, you’ll be able to paste it into something on your Mac – or vice-versa. It’s not limited to text, either: you could scribble a drawing on an iPad and paste it into a document on your Mac.

4. Share files across all devices with iCloud Drive

We’re familiar with using iCloud Drive to store documents and access them from other devices, but in macOS Sierra iCloud gains some new powers: it can share not just the files you’ve stored, but your Mac desktop too. Files on your desktop will be available on any other Mac you sign into, and you’ll be able to access them on iOS devices too. It’s a little bit more elegant than sharing your Desktop folder via OneDrive.

5. Free up hard drive space with iCloud Drive

Apple wasn’t finished with iCloud: in Sierra, it’ll store old files – movies you’ve watched, ebooks you’ve read – in the cloud and make them available instantly, and it will also enable you to clear out the crud that infests every hard disk or SSD eventually. Apple’s demo magically turned 20GB of disk space into 150GB, and while that’s no doubt an extreme example anything that automatically sorts out extra space sounds good to us – even if it does remind us of the Windows Cleanup Wizard, which has been around since Windows XP.

6. Pay for stuff from your browser with Apple Pay

Craig Federighi’s least painful joke – an image of someone trying to pay with a 27-inch iMac -introduced us to Apple Pay on the Mac. It adds a button to participating retailers’ websites, and you’ll be able to authorise the purchase by tapping on your Apple Watch or using TouchID on your iPhone. It’s a little feature that could turn out to be a really big deal, and Microsoft doesn’t have a rival to it.

7. Tabs…

We’re used to tabs in Safari and more recently in Finder, but with macOS Sierra tabs come to any app that would normally invoke multiple windows. Combining that with full-screen mode could be very useful, and the good news for developers is that the feature’s baked into macOS – so they don’t need to do anything to make their apps compatible. On Windows tabs are app-specific.

8. Watch videos AND work with Picture-in-Picture

This is something we’ve already seen on the iPad: the ability to shrink a video to a small rectangle so you can watch the football while getting some work done or arguing with people on the internet. With macOS Sierra, Picture in Picture comes to the desktop too. Microsoft is reportedly working on something similar for its Windows 10 Anniversary Update.

9. Siri comes to desktop

Apple’s digital personal assistant comes to the Mac, and we’re really impressed by what we’ve seen so far: you’ll be able to save Siri’s search results in the Notification Center, which is great if you’ve asked her to find specific files you want to work on, and you’ll be able to drag from Siri’s results to a document – so you could get Siri to search for an image and drag the one you like best directly into a document.

10. Authenticate payments with TouchID

It isn’t in the hardware yet, but TouchID made its way to the Mac in macOS Sierra: as we’ve already seen you can use TouchID on your phone to authenticate Apple Pay purchases, and you can use your Apple Watch or iPhone to automatically unlock your Mac. There’s no reason why those devices can’t be used to authenticate other things, such as third party apps. We’re sure TouchID sensors are coming to the hardware, but this is a perfectly decent alternative in the meantime.

Set faces to stunned – Star Trek’s coming back to the small screen

by

That’s so long to wait, but according to the initial rumours on Hollywood Reporter producer Alex Kurtzman is still looking for writers for the new show.

So if you feel you’ve got what it takes why not drop him a line…

Kurtzman is the producer behind the current Star Trek movie franchise, but the new TV series is reportedly not going to be related to the upcoming Star Trek Beyond movie that’s coming out next year. Whether or not that means the new show will be running along the same alternate timeline as the latest adventures of the Enterprise’s crew, or whether it will treat the existing TV shows as canon, we just don’t know.

It could be Star Trek, but not as we know it.

CBS has announced that it will be a brand new cast of characters though it does say they’ll be seeking out imaginative new worlds and new civilisations, which makes it sound a lot like the original series and The Next Generation’s ongoing missions.

The new series will be created specifically for CBS All Access, it’s own on-demand streaming platform, but have no fear, CBS will also distribute the new show to run concurrently ‘for television and multiple platforms around the world.’

OnePlus X launches: who needs high spec when you’ve got style?

by

Apparently you also dial down the spec list and up the design, making something that resembles the OnePlus X.

This phone is all about the materials used, the aesthetic of the phone taking centre stage to allow for some big changes in the way OnePlus makes it handsets.

The handset comes in onyx glass and fired ceramic, tapered into the 5-inch screen. That display is Full HD and OLED, which comes with a ‘duochrome’ mode that allows battery-saving notifications offered in black and white when you pull your phone out of the bag.

But when it comes to the spec list, don’t except to be overly excited. Firstly, OnePlus appears to have found a box of old Snapdragon chipsets from Qualcomm and decided to throw the 801 into the new phones. That’s right, a CPU from 2013.

It’s backed up with 3GB of RAM in fairness, but don’t expect the OnePlus X to win any smarpthone speed races – just keep rolling your finger over the lovely ceramic back.

Not all fur coat

There are some decent parts though: this phone can handle a microSD card, which sadly can’t be used as part of the internal storage as the OnePlus X is based on Android 5.1, with OxygenOS the main overlay adding more functionality to the mix.

This includes a ‘Shelf’ that’s accessed from the home screen with a swipe to let you see your favourite apps and widgets, and a slider on the side of the phone to let you set the phone from normal sound mode to priority only, all the way down to the classic ‘off, leave me alone phone fools’.

Bizarrely OnePlus is making a huge deal of the fact it’s packed an FM radio into the phone, pointing out how it won’t take data from your mobile plan or Wi-Fi. Because that’s a major problem that needed fixing.

The camera seems pretty powerful at 13MP on the rear with slow motion video capture and a fairly strong ability to capture low light images with an f/2.2 aperture, but it’s not going to be industry leading.

The 2525mAh battery should be good enough to last quite a while in this phone though, with the OLED screen, low, low power processor and the notifications optimiser – we’re looking forward to putting it through its paces.

The OnePlus X release date has been set for November 5 for the onyx edition and November 24 for the ceramic version. The former comes in at a rather reasonable Rs. 16,999 while the latter will set you back a fair amount more at Rs. 22,999, with invites needed to get your hands on both.