Apple's new iPad experiences a few Wi-Fi issues

There's a few reports out there that Apple's new iPad exhibits a few Wi-Fi connectivity problems. And users opting for LTE are discovering just how expensive the alternative is.

The Wi-Fi issues are reportedly sporadic, but some owners of the new iPad say that placing it next to their laptops are finding that the signal strength is notably less on the iPad.

Yet some of those who opt to use 4G cellular instead, as available in the U.S., are discovering that the new connectivity is rather more expensive than they had initially believed.

For now, there's still no word from Apple, but buyers have taken to the Apple Forums to voice their concerns, and to compare notes on working solutions.

And it seems that holding the iPad by the bottom corners appears to worsen the problem, and some users have seen better performance by resetting their network connections. Still, some are accepting that it's a hardware issue and have switched to cellular connectivity instead, which does seem to be performing.

The Wall Street Journal has been talking to some of those who've increased their data cap, seeing just how easily it can happen. The paper also reports one user who found the Wi-Fi in his local café to be too choppy for streaming video, so he switched it off in preference for LTE and managed to burn through 2 GB of data in less than a week, prompting him, and lots of others, to consider upgrading their wireless packages with their carriers.

Users of the new iPad in the U.S. are finding 4G speeds topping out between 5 and 6 Mb per second during the day, but say they are achieving almost double that off-peak.

That's easily comparable to the ADSL speeds most users enjoy for now, and is creating use cases which are remarkable in their average consumption of bandwidth.

Another example saw a user buying his iPad on Friday and then spending a couple of hours watching college basketball with the iPad apparently mounted on his dashboard, which was enough to hit the limits. More remarkable was the user's mother, who sat in the living room while her new iPad streamed video of the sleeping baby in the room next door, via the AT&T cellular network.

Verizon Wireless makes the point that LTE networks literally consume more data, particularly when streaming video. Modern video codecs also alter the amount of the compression ratio based on the speed of the connection, and mobile operators are guilty of layering their own compression.

That's good news for the wireless carriers who, for the first time, aren't being accused of failing to provide enough bandwidth. All users that the WSJ spoke to are considering upgrading their data allowance instead. That's enough to push anyone onto Wi-Fi, assuming they can get a signal.

Source

Read the rest of this entry »

Steve Jobs and his life with Apple

Remember a few years ago, when your Apple store on any given Saturday afternoon ceased being the clean, technological zendo you once admired — the place you bought your iMac — and instead became a crowded bazaar of idealized wonder and hopeless waits at the Genius Bar?

The movement spread. People built their lives around the objects Steve Jobs gave them: the MacBook, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. What happened with Jobs and Apple over the past decade is one of the rare participatory phenomena of our disconnected and no-longer-common culture. It was as if this generation’s defining event took place in a shopping plaza and then up in the “cloud,” and this time everyone (that is, everyone who could afford Apple products) got to go to Woodstock.

People stopped lining up for concert tickets and started lining up for new phones. This was the future right in front of you. It was sleek, responding to your touch. Imagine explaining an iPad to someone from 1984. They might get it, they might not.

Steve Jobs died Wednesday at age 56 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer that his wasting form came to wear as familiarly as his preference for outdated jeans and black turtlenecks. When news of his death broke around 7:30 p.m. on the East Coast, a good number of us sought immediate solace (to say nothing of information) from our Apple stuff. The rippling tweets and shares fanned outward.

Swipe, swipe, touch. The nighttime news anchors, fearful of the obsolescence that dogs them at every turn, turned to ­social-media feeds for confirmation of a shared sense of loss; they invited hipster tech writers and thinkers who scorn old-media ways to make themselves available to grieve analytically on the air. (The digital air, that is; in Jobs’s world, we sacrificed the broadcast band to the broadband.) You can easily imagine newspaper assignment desks, similarly afflicted with professional hypochondria, scrambling reporters to Apple stores to gather quotes from the bereaved.

That is what Steve Jobs gave us: the future. A sense of ourselves moving forward into this century, which has proved especially hard to do, with its lack of employment opportunities and its addiction to panic. He gave us a look at the future and all the ambivalence and worry that comes with it. It was the most elegant form of social disruption, and now your kids won’t glance up from their iPhones. They’ll never need to.

We spend a lot of time wishing for the past, carping about our gizmos and the sway they lord over us, while loading up our iPods with songs that were popular when we were in high school, while stalking old boyfriends on Facebook. That in itself is a pleasant form of grief, but it is grief all the same.

Jobs kept nudging us away from that. Under his leadership, Apple’s subliminal selling point was: Let it go. Let go of the uneasiness about computers. Let go of ugly, antique technology. Let go of the fantasy future of personal rocketships. Let go of the expensive, shiny new phone that you bought last year for the slightly less expensive, shiny new phone that’s coming out this year. But let go of something deeper, something resistant in you that romanticizes the past.

In 2011, so much of our culture — as well as our politics — feels as though we’re losing grip on the old, beloved things. Where did record stores go? What happened to letters that come in the mail? Where did movie theaters go? What about the books? Where is my Main Street? Where is my America?

Jobs had been teaching us to say goodbye to all that for decades — we just didn’t know it. Some of us said goodbye to typewriters in the 1980s when we finished term papers using MacWrite on a Macintosh Plus for the first time. Some of us said goodbye when we made PTA fliers and “Lost Dog” posters that were far and away better than their Sharpie-scrawled predecessors. Let it go, let it go: Take your CDs to Goodwill; give your books to the library sale.

It was therefore an irresistible metaphor, in these final years, when the auditorium lights would go down and the crowd would go wild for Jobs, who increasingly greeted his followers and touted the latest neat, new thing even as he wore the look of a person who was not going into that future with us. He would be getting off here; we were to proceed without him into the unknown. Let it go and look ahead was the message all along.

Source

Read the rest of this entry »

New Apple CEO Tim Cook is welcomed with Shares

New apple CEO Tim Cook is welcomed with Shares

A few days after taking over as Apple’s CEO, Tom Cook is already feeling the warmth at the top of one of the world’s most valuable companies. Today Apple awarded Cook with 1 million shares.

At the rate of today’s shares at just over of $383 each, Tim Cook is now just over $383 million richer. Nice day at the office.

This of course is in addition to a fat pay slip and other numerous benefits as the leader of all the innovative brain of Apple.

The deal of shares will tie Cook to Apple for the next one year and guarantee the company of his services as long as he is fit to perform. This is a great gesture from this giant company and it sets a good example to other companies on how to motivate and retain valuable staff members and leaders.

Read the rest of this entry »

Apple is set to introduce a TV set next year

Apple is set to introduce a TV set next year

The speculation going round about Apple introducing a TV to its series of products is growing stronger, with more interesting signals coming from Apple.

There is strong likelihood that the TV will be introduced next year and will operate on iOS.

Apple already has a TV set box that offers a little television content, however the new TV set is said to offer more subscription-only content like any other pay TV.

In February, Apple advertised for a job post for technical staff who can work on a TV this means that they are working on it.

Furthermore, recently, the new CEO of Apple Tim Cook mentioned that one of his challenges would be to elevate Apple’s new products and he explicitly mentioned TV as one of the products. Looks like the future is now.

Read the rest of this entry »