Apple News, Analysis and Podcasts
 The AppleTV is a nice device for the living room. Right now, it can play music and movies from a number of sources like iTunes, YouTube, Netflix, or an iOS device through Airplay. Through Airplay, the AppleTV can also mirror the display of an iOS device and a Mac Computer.
Mirroring a Mac display on the AppleTV is nice, but it is limiting. Users can’t watch an Internet movie on the AppleTV and still use their Mac at the same time. This limits the usefulness of not only the AppleTV , but also the Mac. This is all going to change this Fall.
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Apple is rebooting its award winning ad campaign, but this time around it has Tim Cook’s signature all over it.
Apple is taking to the airwaves with a new 60 second ad campaign, focused solely on its brand. Apple’s first brand reboot came in 1997 when Steve Jobs reemerged as Apple’s iCEO and left an indelible mark on the culture of tech, with the amazing Think Different campaign. No products, no glitz, just the impactful words “Here's to the crazy ones...” Apple positioned itself as the heart of the nonconformist during a time when 95 percent of the world was using a Microsoft PC.
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OS X Mountain Lion took away something very dear to many Mac users: RSS Feeds (sometimes also called Atom feeds). RSS feeds (Really Simple Syndication) is a technology used by websites and social media to notify subscribers when content has been updated. For example, on this website you can subscribe to an RSS Feed that will notify you every time a new article is posted.
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Yesterday, at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference, Phil Schiller stole the show during the Keynote presentation when unveiling the new Mac Pro. “Can’t innovate anymore — my ass!” said Schiller. The crowd erupted in laugher and applause. "The new Mac Pro looks like no other computer, ever." Schiller said the new Mac Pro was a forward looking product, meeting the needs of video editors, photographers, musicians and graphic artists. But what about Server Admins? Couldn't the new Mac Pro be a great Server too? The answer is, of course it could.
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 Wisdom says that you can learn more about a person by watching what they do rather than listening to what they say. You can also learn a lot about what someone chooses not to say, or avoids saying.
We don't have to go back too many WWDC’s ago when Apple shared its stage with companies such as Microsoft, Intel or Adobe. But if you watched today's keynote, you'll notice none of these tech giants were seen on stage let alone mentioned (except for Intel’s new Haswell processors).
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 Is Apple about to break the Babe Ruth rule of doing one thing, and doing it well? That is very likely to be the case with Apple delivering a larger screen iPhone, but all eyes are on WWDC and whether or not Apple will also be showing off a summer iPhone 5S update to the market.
Steve Jobs was against a multiple device mobile lineup, and felt his simplified ideal should be the only way Apple approached the market. But Jobs isn't in charge anymore, and it appears Tim Cook is setting the sails towards filling out the iPhone lineup with multiple screen sizes.
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 Apple will be showing off their new versions of iOS and OS X at WWDC this year. iOS 7 should see some big changes since Jonathan Ive took over development for Scott Forstall (fired by CEO Tim Cook in October 2012). Ive is expected to update the user interface, but Apple needs more than an iOS facelift to stay ahead of the competition.
Jonathan Ive took over iOS development in the middle of its development cycle. Apple had to pull developers from OS X to get iOS back on schedule. This means OS X 10.9 will be unlikely to see any major changes and may even be released after iOS 7. What are we likely to see from the next major operating system updates from Apple besides an interface change?
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 Unless you've been living under a rock the past few months, it has been virtually impossible to escape Microsoft's Surface ad campaign. TV, the web, and probably soon, radio and direct mail Surface SPAM will be entering your life. The Redmond software giant is using a massive portion of it's $1.5 billion advertising budget to promote Surface. However, advertising budgets do not equal sales, something that Microsoft does not seem to understand. Surface sales continue to fail even the lowest of expectations.
Microsoft launched the Surface under a campaign known as "The Surface Movement" containing youth oriented Dubstep music, with young and attractive business professionals, all dancing with Surface tablets. This ad campaign failed miserably, so Microsoft is trying a new approach. This week the campaign shifted to an all out attack on Apple's iPad. Two ads have been released so far, but they are attempting to use Apple's ad format in an effort to discredit the iPad as limited and dated when compared to Surface. The main issue with these ads is they approach the viewer as if it were 1990, assuming the public is truly ignorant about what make tablets work.
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 Apple, Inc's World-Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) is fast approaching, and while Apple CEO Tim Cook has allued to having no new hardware arriving until this fall, software will be the big focus for Apple's annual developers event. A new version of Apple's mobile iOS and desktop OS X software is going to be shown, but perhaps more important than these fundamental pieces of Apple's ecosystem is iCloud. The future of computing, how we access and manipulate data is rapidly moving to server-side solutions, or "cloud" architecture, and Apple has been falling behind its competition at a rapid rate.
Google and others have taken an aggressive approach in developing a wide array of cloud services and tools, wasting little time in building robust ecosystems. Google, clearly out in front with an impress user base, has built a formidable Microsoft Office competitor in Google Docs. But Google's cloud platform has gone well beyond email or users loading and creating documents stored online. Google's entire cloud platform covers development for data mining, custom cloud storage, Enterprise search and much more.
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Microsoft’s latest Windows 8 mobile phone ad is admittedly somewhat clever. It shows a wedding where the bride’s side of the aisle is filled with Google Android phone users, while the groom’s side is made up of all iPhone users. Another, and more subtle note, is that the Android side is filled with mostly hip, young people, while the iPhone side of the aisle is populated with older people (40+). During the ceremony an iPhone user asks a person from the Android aisle, “Would you mind moving your enormous phone?” because the Android person is using their oversized phone to take a picture. This question is really a thinly veiled derogatory statement. What quickly follows is a humorous exchange of insults between Android and iPhone users. Soon after a fight breaks out.
Standing in the middle of the fight are two caterers who have red and yellow Nokia Lumia phones running Windows 8. For some reason they aren't drawn into the fight nor does the fight ever come to them. As they stand in the middle of this chaos taking pictures and scrolling through the Windows 8 tiled interface (for whatever reason), one caterer asks the other, “Do you think if they knew about the new Nokia Lumia they'd stop fighting all the time?” The other caterer responds, “I don't know. I think they kinda like fighting.” The commercial ends with a man ripping his shirt open (ala Superman) and tattooed onto the center of his chest is an Apple logo. Immediately he is knocked over from behind by an unseen Android user. Microsoft’s tag line is “Don’t Fight. Switch.”
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