Apple Glass AR designed to give homage to the retro glasses Steve Jobs wore!

Antonio De Rosa and Apple concepts are the perfect smoothies we love and the Italian designer has surprised me again. This time Antonio has gone for a piece of concept that has a lot of nostalgia as well as the historical value attached to it. Meet the Apple glass concept that pays homage to Steve Jobs favorite pair of prescription glasses – the Lunor Classic PP. Apple co-founder was obsessed with this eyewear ever since he got influenced by the ways of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi – who apparently shaped up Steve’s very thought process. After the turmoil of being fired by the board of Apple, he got the pair of circular wire-rim glasses to emulate his hero and ultimately returned stronger than ever as the CEO of Apple. Later on, Steve switched to the rimless brand Lunor Ideal i 380.

Combine that iconic piece of historical magnificence with the brewing rumors of the Apple AR eyeglasses, and it makes for a perfect case. Yes, this concept by Antonio makes even more sense since the world is expecting the augmented reality glasses by Apple to be announced as soon as this year. Having them in the Lunor Classic PP theme will be the apt strategy to go for if Apple is reading this piece. The AR glasses are in the second phase of testing since the start of this year and now this concept design weights its worth in gold. The rounded glass frame coincides with the rumor last year by trusted leakster Jon Prosser who claimed that Apple is working on Steve Jobs Heritage Edition AR eyeglasses.

These countered glasses look absolutely stylish for the generation next crowd- with the frame crafted from lightweight aluminum and the lenses made out of polycarbonate material. The technology of these wearables is honed by an array of six cameras with autofocus lenses, an eye-tracking system with HDR, and gesture recognition. The glasses even track your calorie intake and health status. Coming onto the cameras, two cameras are tucked in the nose-piece assemblies and the other two on the opposite side of each nose piece. Other cameras and sensors take a position in the crossbar connecting the two lenses. What I like the most besides the glasses is the AirPods style charging case for them!

Designer: Antonio De Rosa

Retro iOS icon collection gives your iPhone a classic Apple Macintosh vibe!

It doesn’t get more Apple Fanboy than this… (In a good way!)

You can now turn your new, bleeding-edge iPhone into a beautiful throwback machine with this retro icon set by digital designer Ben Vessey. Titled the iOS (Old School), this handmade set of over 100 icons gives your iPhone a beautifully vintage ’84 Apple Macintosh vibe with its pixelated style. Available in both regular and dark mode variants, Vessey’s lovingly and painstakingly designed icons for virtually every commonplace app, and made them available on Gumroad for an extremely reasonable price of £3.99 ($5.53).

The icons make use of an Apple iOS 14 feature called Shortcuts, which lets you create custom thumbnails for apps (MKBHD shows you how in this video). Vessey’s app-pack comes with more than 110 beautifully vintage-styled icons and both black and white backgrounds that you can use to turn your modern smartphone into a retro-inspired, clean, minimalist device that would probably impress Jobs! Does it also increase battery life? I doubt it, although the dark mode should consume lesser power, theoretically!

Now all you need to do is pop one of these retro-themed Spigen smartphone cases and you’re absolutely set!

Designer: Ben Vessey

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The 1976 Apple computer-I can now get a custom made bespoke, midcentury luxury case it deserves!

It’s hard to imagine Steve Jobs selling his Volkswagen Type 2 Microbus to help fund and produce friend, Steve Wozniack’s hand-built and custom-designed Apple Computer-I back in 1976, but that’s how the story goes. The Apple Computer-I, more casually called Apple-I, is a desktop computer that’s hardly in circulation today due to its discontinuation with Apple-II’s debut. Wozniak and Jobs first sold Apple-1 as only a bare board, a single-etched and silkscreened circuit board, with no electronic parts so that consumers could build their own computers, only needing an additional television set and keyboard. Today, Sweden-based designer, Love Hultén builds his own re-interpretation of Apple-1, or rather a midcentury display case to cradle the old tech relic, and calls it Aple.

Aple is a bespoke, made-to-order, battery-operated display cabinet that encases original, ‘Woz-built,’ Apple motherboards from 1976 or later. Unlike Apple-I’s consumer products, Hultén’s display case comes equipped with a fully integrated keyboard and monitor protection framing that’s hand-constructed out of either black walnut or old growth teak wood. The wooden monitor housing perches above the display cabinet on an angled mount carved from the same wood as the rest of the case. On the display case’s right side, a pull out drawer reveals the motherboard’s circuitry. Mostly enclosed, Apple-I’s circuit board can be magnified by looking through the case’s plexiglass dome, resembling a crystal ball cut in half, which Love Hultén might have included to evoke 1970s era mysticism. The backside of Hultén’s Aple unveils a retro, standard switchboard that deepens the product’s tribute to the technology of yesterday, eliciting curiosity for all the functions and hidden features to be unlocked.

The development and story of Apple-I are just as exciting today as years ago and Love Hultén is giving the tech giant’s initial success a brand new stage. Love Hultén is known for taking timely products, like tropical-themed synth players and portable, arcade-period gaming consoles, and turning them into artfully funky displays that give the designs of yesterday a timeless fit for today. Be sure to check out the rest of Love Hultén’s work and hey, if you ever find yourself with one of the six operating Apple-1’s in circulation today, send it over to Hultén for a modern-day facelift, he knows what to do.

Designer: Love Hultén

Today is the 10th Anniversary of iPad’s Launch

Steve Jobs at the iPad’s Launch

It's been exactly 10 years since Steve Jobs announced the iPad on the 27th of January, 2010. This was the last product he unveiled before his death due to pancreatic cancer in 2011. While today marks the 10th anniversary of the iPad’s launch, there were a lot of skeptics at that time.

They argued that a tablet was an unnecessary product. However, Jobs remained confident. He explained that there was always room for a device that was in between a laptop and a smartphone as long as it was superior at certain tasks.  True to his word, not only was the iPad successful, but even Apple's competitors launched their own tablets. 

iPad served as a prototype for future tablet models

Today, tablets have become very popular and are an integral part of how we choose to compute and browse the Internet. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the iPad was the prototype for all future tablets. When Jobs announced the iPad, he referred to it as a magical and revolutionary device. He recommended everybody use the iPad to browse the web, send and receive an email, check photos, watch videos and listen to music, play games, read documents and ebooks, etc.

iPad had a very humble and modest beginning

The first iPad that he launched the game with the 9.7-inch display and 64 GB of storage. It had a single-core Apple A4 processor, 10 hours of battery life, 256 MB of RAM, Wi-Fi, and 3G connectivity, and a headphone jack. The initial iPads didn’t have cameras. People loved the iPads nonetheless because they were lightweight, and measured half an inch in thickness and weighed only 1.5 pounds. No notebook or laptop was as thin and lightweight as an iPad. Ever since Apple has continued to release a new iPad every year with several changes made to both software and hardware. 

10th anniversary of iPad’s launch proves iPad is a model for all tablets

Currently, iPads are the most important tablets and are representative of this type of gadget. Their processing power has increased, and iPad rivals notebooks and desktops in many manners when it comes to processing, ease of use, and features. Steve Jobs certainly left a very important legacy just before his passing. The 10th anniversary of the iPad’s launch is an ode to all the efforts that this man put to make computers more innovative and accessible. 

The post Today is the 10th Anniversary of iPad’s Launch appeared first on Walyou.

The tech CEOs’ year of reckoning

It wasn't so long ago that tech CEOs and their wares were changing the world. In fact, we heard that quite often: This or that "innovation" will make the planet a better place. Silicon Valley was clearly getting high on its own supply as it ramped up...

The new iPhone 11 Pro – An old, familiar design, with a new secret sauce

Apple’s product lineup under Jobs was radically different from its lineup under Cook. Cook’s vision for Apple and the iPhone is to take the existing and make it better. Take the earpods and turn them into wireless Airpods, take the iPad and turn it into an iPad Pro, and now with the iPhone, take the world’s most popular smartphone, and turn it into a serious instrument for content creation.

The iPhone 11 Pro is, just like every iPhone, the best damn iPhone ever made, but without Jony Ive, the keynote seemed to evoke a lot of déjà vu. Nothing much has changed as far as the design goes, for starters. There’s a third lens, an A13 bionic chip, and a new color, Midnight Green. Other than that, the iPhone 11 isn’t a dramatic visual upgrade, like the iPhone X was, or the iPhone 6 was. Apple’s innovation, for the most part, has been fueled by cutting-edge hardware and software developments. The new phone has a Super Retina XDR display with industry-leading brightness, vividness, and contrast ratios, while at the same time consuming lesser power. Three lenses give the iPhone 11 Pro superior camera props, allowing you to shoot telephoto, wide, and ultra-wide from the same vantage point, with incredible detail, and also the presence of a low-light night-mode. The cameras on the front are a dramatic improvement too, with a wide lens giving you wide-angle selfies, and a portrait feature on both sides allowing you to calibrate the depth-of-field. The iPhone 11 Pro shines in the video department, with stunning 4K video recording, and tools that allow you to edit video in powerful new ways. The iPhone 11 Pro, as its name suggests, is the consumer-favorite iPhone, but tweaked to suit the demands of a professional. Oh, did I mention, it comes with a free 1 year subscription to Apple TV+ too? That’s just Tim’s way of reminding us that Apple isn’t an industrial-design-driven company anymore, it’s a service-design-driven company now.

Designer: Apple

Apple’s bulbous, colorful iMac went on sale 21 years ago today

At Engadget, we spend every day looking at how technology will shape the future. But it's also important to look back at how far we've come. That's what This Week in Tech History does. Join us for a recap of historical tech news, anniversaries and ad...

Steve Jobs would be proud of the 2018 Apple iPad Pro

The iPad for the longest time has been a glorified media machine, being used to watch content on and occasionally work with. In fact, sales even dwindled post the launch of the iPad Mini, and tablets soon became less and less appealing. The iPad Pro, and its focus on creators helped rekindle the world’s interests in the iPad, so much so that the number of iPads sold just last year beats the number of notebooks sold by any company worldwide! The point Apple is trying to make is that the iPad Pro is capable of dethroning the laptop. It did so with an incredibly strong GPU, CPU, and a battery that promised to last all day. It also came with Apple’s pencil, a powerful tool that allowed you to use this magical slab of glass as a canvas to create some absolutely mesmeric artpieces (all of Apple’s custom logos for their October event were made on the iPad).

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The iPad Pro, however, came with a few flaws that wouldn’t slide with Jobs. It didn’t look different from the regular iPad. It just had higher specs, cost a whole lot more, and came with an Apple Pencil that could only be charged by sticking its end into the iPad… something that’s still considered to be one of the biggest design crimes ever. The camera lacked pizzazz, and there wasn’t a place to store the pencil when not in use. Today, everything changed dramatically for the better. The new iPad Pro is refreshing, beautiful, and shows that Apple is still capable of making some really well-designed hardware.

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Tim referred to the iPad as a magical piece of glass and the redesign truly feels like it. At just 5.9mm, it’s gloriously thin, and comes with a screen that stretches all the way to the ends. No home button, no bezel, just a bunch of really bright pixels that make it feel like you’re carrying light. The new screen is a Liquid Retina screen (just like in the iPhone XR) and sits at 11 inches. The home button is sent bags-a-packin and the new uniformly thick bezel integrates Apple’s FaceID camera right into it. The iPad comes with four speakers on all four corners, instead of two at its base, allowing it to give you an expansive audio experience, and also allowing you to use the iPad in any orientation without worrying about its audio being muffled. Another massive update is the fact that the iPad Pro, recognizing that it needs to dethrone notebooks, ditches the lightning charger for a USB-C port (more on that further below!)

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A new iPad means a new Apple Pencil too. The revamped pencil comes with a unibody cylindrical design and a flat edge. The flat edge serves two purposes. It allows the pencil to magnetically dock to the side of the iPad Pro, giving you the ability to carry the pencil and tablet together rather than separately. That magnetic snap also allows the Pencil to instantly pair with the iPad and even establish a wireless charging connection, which means you don’t need to shove the Pencil up the iPad’s rear every time it dies out, and also means your Pencil is always ambiently charging while snapped to the side of your iPad. The new solution is neat, elegant, and would have been the norm had Jobs been around when the iPad Pro dropped two years ago. Nevertheless, it’s good to know Apple still has it in them to craft elegant solutions. On the flip side, there’s no headphone jack. :(

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Now to the USB-C. Apple’s decision to change the port on the iPad Pro means you can now connect your iPad to anything from a DSLR, to a MIDI controller, to even an external screen. Apple went a step further and even built a feature into the iPad that lets you connect it to your iPhone and charge it! Yes. You can charge your iPhone with your iPad! This heavy-lifting makes the iPad a strong competitor in not just the tablet market, but the notebook market too. Apple says that the new iPad Pro is faster and better than 92% of all existing notebooks.

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The new iPad comes with Apple’s A12X bionic chip, giving it the ability to run augmented reality as well as match the performance of an Xbox One S in the graphics department. With an 8 core CPU and a 7 core GPU, the iPad Pro is quite literally a beast, and is even capable of viewing extremely detailed and heavy AutoCAD files as well as handling desktop-style Photoshop, resplendent with every single feature, working with PSD files without breaking a sweat… and it does all this while retaining the iPad’s promise of a full day’s worth of battery.

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In every which way, the iPad Pro 2018 would make Jobs proud. It looks spectacular, feels spectacular, comes with conscientious design details like the magnetic-snap Pencil, the four speakers, and the ability to connect your iPad to a variety of devices (and even charge your iPhone)… and lastly, does all this while quite possibly showing a very Jobsian middle finger to its competitors by boasting of a performance that can quite literally blow the competition out of the water. Oh, did I mention, it’s completely environment-friendly too?

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