Apple launches new MacBook Pro

Apple Inc on Monday launched an updated version of its MacBook Pro, with modified keyboards as the laptop line had faced criticism for typing-related problems, while boosting performance and adding storage.

Apple said its new lineup of MacBook Pro was available to order and was priced at $1,299, while its education-focused model was priced at $1,199.

MacBooks account for 9 percent of the company's total revenue.

The new keyboard follows the "scissor" mechanism more commonly found in the industry.

The iPhone maker switched back to the mechanism, discarding the "butterfly" keyboards, after it complaints of sticky, unresponsive keys and keystrokes that failed to register when tiny amounts of dust or debris accumulated under or near keys. 

(Reporting by Neha Malara and C Nivedita in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli)

-reuters-

Huawei's MateBook X Pro makes case for premium, touchscreen laptop

MANILA -- Huawei on Wednesday debuted the MateBook X Pro in the Philippines, the latest in a stream of low key launches for premium products with most of the world on lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Shenzhen-based Huawei is promising powerful performance in a sleek, stealthy metal frame, aiming squarely at the top of the premium everyday laptop heap.

With a 91-percent screen-to-body ratio that trumps the Macbook Pro, the 3K (3000 x 2000) 13.9 inch panel offers an immersive experience. Text and images are sharp and the screen is bright enough to keep it at around 70 percent in our initial tests.

The 10-point touch screen offers a new way of interacting with the device which can make work faster by easing the burden on the trackpad. Think using an iPad pro as a work machine, but with a reliable keyboard.

The screen is meant to be touched, Huawei said, made out of Gorilla Glass with an anti-fingerprint coating.

The wide keyboard with backlit keys feels solid when typing and hides the camera in the topmost row, as in the MateBook D15. The power button doubles as a fingerprint sensor for added security.

Huawei is positioning its laptops like its smartphones in terms of battery endurance. The 57 Wh lasted for a full day of work from home in our initial test. The bundled 65-watt charger also supercharges Huawei smartphones and wireless earbuds cases.

The MateBook X Pro comes with Huawei Share for seamless file sharing between phone and laptop. It runs on the 10th generation Intel Core i7 with 16GB RAM and 512GB to 1TB of internal storage.

We will be coming out with a full review in the coming weeks. Here are the full specifications.

The MateBook X Pro will retail for P119,990. Pre-order customers from April 15 to 24 will get P11,990 worth of freebies: a backpack, mouse and Freebuds 3 wireless earphones.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Steve Jobs was right: Smartphones and tablets killed the PC

I got an iPad Pro recently, and I’ve fallen madly in love with it.

This was unexpected. I’ve had iPads before, but like a lot of people, I hadn’t found them to be very useful. Tablets were good for surfing the Web and watching Netflix, but they’ve always been dogged by the charge that you couldn’t get a lot of work done on them.

Apple’s latest iPads are different. Not only can you get work done on them; in many ways they’re productivity dream machines. Today’s iPads are powered by custom-designed processors that are faster than the chips on some of the Macs Apple makes, and the iPad’s separately sold keyboard is better and more durable than the accursed, falling-apart mess of a keyboard that Apple is shipping on its much-maligned current line of laptops.

Apple unveiled a new 16-inch MacBook with a revamped keyboard on Wednesday, good news for the many Apple lovers who’ve been grumbling about the company’s lackluster slate of recent Macs. But I think the iPad is already beginning to eclipse the traditional personal computer. In the four months I’ve had this latest model, the iPad Pro has eaten into the time I spend on my phone and my old-school laptop and desktop. Among other things, I now research and write just about every column using an iPad (I still compose many first drafts by speaking into my headphones, but I’m an odd duck).

I thought I had gotten out of the gadget-reviewing business for good last year. Since the smartphone had gobbled up everything from cameras to music players to portable gaming systems, I declared the whole field of gadgetry dead. But just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.

The history of the iPad is a story about consolidation, focus and the power of scale in the tech business. It’s a story about how thoroughly one company, Apple, has dominated the entire hardware business this decade. And it is also, really, a story about the only thing that mattered in tech in the 2010s — the smartphone — and the way that one device became the gravitational center of the entire tech business, shaping every market in the industry, and much of the non-tech world beyond it.

The iPad has always been freighted with great expectations. Although the iPad was unveiled in 2010, three years after the iPhone, development of the iPad predated development of the phone, and Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder, always seemed to have his heart in the tablet.

In one of his last interviews before his death in 2011, Jobs declared the iPad to be the future of computing. “PCs are going to be like trucks,” he told journalists Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg — meaning the traditional Mac and Windows machines would still be around, but like big rigs, they’d be used by a small set of power users for a dwindling set of specific, high-power tasks. The “cars” of the tech industry, as Jobs saw it, would be phones and tablets.

For a while, he was only partially right. The iPad sold well at launch, but after a few years it hit some hurdles. After Jobs’s death, Apple left the iPad to languish, and did something similar with the Mac.

Meanwhile, something amazing happened with the iPhone and the many Android-based copycat phones it inspired. In the 2010s, smartphones became more popular, more powerful and more profitable than anyone in the tech industry thought possible. Within a few years, their sales and usage eclipsed that of PCs, and for much of the decade they were the fountain of most new consumer innovations across the technology industry. Smartphones made Uber and Instagram and Snapchat and TikTok possible. Smartphone cameras began to surpass stand-alone cameras, turning much of culture and society into a meme-soaked playground where visual media matters more than text.

The smartphone also altered the business dynamics of the tech industry. When the iPhone came out, Apple was just one of many successful hardware companies in the world. But the smartphone decimated a host of phone brands (remember Nokia? Motorola?), and as smartphones gained more power, they began making life impossible for a slate of hardware startups, from GoPro to Jawbone.

On the strength of the iPhone, Apple began capturing a greater and greater slice of the tech hardware business; although it didn’t sell a majority of units, its commitment to the high end of the market allowed it to make the bulk of profits. In the last quarter of 2017, according to one estimate, Apple made 86 percent of profits in the smartphone industry.

Apple’s dominance came despite the fact that the company made some big mistakes and was late to many big innovations. Samsung, not Apple, invented huge-screen phones. Apple’s Mac line was plagued by delays and dead ends, including a 2013 redesign of the Mac Pro that looked like a trash can and proved just as useful. And on the iPad, for many years, Apple just seemed to fall asleep. The iPad’s stylus and keyboard-forward design? Microsoft did it first on the Surface.

Yet none of this mattered. Because of its hold on the smartphone business and a very sticky software ecosystem that users found hard to leave, Apple has been able to incorporate many innovations pioneered elsewhere and sell its customers on a series of peripheral billion-dollar businesses, including the Apple Watch and AirPods.

And ultimately, it’s the ecosystem that explains why I can’t stop raving about the iPad. When it came out, the big knock on the iPad was that it was just a big phone; today, that’s what I love about it — like the Watch or AirPods, the iPad feels intuitive and natural to me because it works just like the device I use most often, my phone.

Like a phone, in most scenarios I find the iPad to be faster, more portable and easier to use and maintain than any traditional PC I’ve ever owned. The iPad’s limited screen space and emphasis on full-screen apps also makes for fewer distractions than on a traditional personal computer. The iPad, like my phone, lets me log in to my bank using my face; the Mac, in 2019, doesn’t even have a touch screen.

The iPad still can’t do everything a laptop can, and I still have to log in to a “real” computer sometimes. I had a long chat recently with Dan Seifert, the deputy editor of the Verge, who uses an iPad every day on the subway but often finds the device infuriating.

“For someone like me, who’s been using a desktop operating system for a long time, there’s a lot of built-in conventions that I’m used to that can be frustrating,” Seifert said. In particular, the iPad doesn’t work with antiquated work flows that are built for PCs. Say you need to log into your company’s bespoke publishing system or expense program? It’s possible those won’t work on your iPad — at least not yet — because they were built for much older devices.

But Seifert agreed with me that many of these uses are a special case. He still uses PCs because often, in Jobs’ parlance, he needs a truck. Most people, however, don’t need trucks, and few of us will need them in the future. Seifert isn’t teaching his kids how to use desktop operating systems like the Mac or Windows, and neither am I.

It took longer than he expected, but Steve Jobs was right. Over the past decade, for most people, in most use cases, phones killed the PC. To get work done, now you just use a big phone — which Apple happens to call an iPad.


2019 New York Times News Service

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Apple moves Mac Pro production to China from US - report

Apple Inc is shifting manufacturing of its new Mac Pro desktop computer to China from the United States, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The move comes at a time when the Trump administration has threatened to impose new levies to cover nearly all imports from China and pressured Apple and other manufacturers to make their products in the United States if they want to avoid tariffs.

Last week, Apple asked its major suppliers to assess the cost implications of moving 15 to 30 percent of their production capacity from China to Southeast Asia, according to a Nikkei report.

"If true, suggests to me that Apple has tremendous confidence that the US and China will be able to solve their trade dispute and do so in the near-future," D.A. Davidson analyst Tom Forte said in an email.

China is a key market for Apple as well as a major production center for its devices. The company got nearly 18 percent of its total revenue from Greater China in the quarter ended March.

Apple's Mac Pro, a $6,000 machine used by creative professionals, has been facing waning demand, the Journal said.

The company does not break out sales numbers for its Mac Pro machines. The desktop is part of the company's Mac line of products, which accounted for less than 10 percent of Apple's total sales in 2018. In 2018, Apple sold about 18 million Mac products, compared with about 218 million iPhones.

"Like all of our products, the new Mac Pro is designed and engineered in California and includes components from several countries including the United States," an Apple spokesman said. "Final assembly is only one part of the manufacturing process."

Apple's decision coincides with the end of tax subsidies that it got for making the desktop in a plant in Texas run by contract manufacturer Flex Ltd, according to the Journal.

"(This) serves as a reminder that, relative to the US, manufacturing in China remains a lower-cost alternative and benefits from an existing infrastructure, versus having to, potentially, rebuild one in the US," Forte said.

The tech giant has tapped contractor Quanta Computer Inc to manufacture the computer and is ramping up production at a factory near Shanghai, the report said.

Quanta did not respond to a request for comment.

Apple's shares were down marginally at $198.69.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

AsusPro business laptop: A featherweight that packs welterweight punch

MANILA - Business laptops are all about portability, power and battery life. As a category, they may not always be the prettiest of the lot, but in terms of practicality, they are at the top. 

The AsusPro doesn’t have the refined looks of the Taiwanese electronic company’s flagship ZenBooks, or the graphics processing muscle of its ROG gaming laptops. But at a little over 1 kilogram in weight, the Asuspro is much much lighter than either of them. For most business tasks, the AsusPro also gets the job done, plus a little more. 

Our review unit, dubbed the P5440, came with an 8th generation Core i5 processor running at 1.8 GHz, 8GB of RAM and a 512GB solid state drive, which are pretty standard for this class of laptops. But the AsusPro can also be configured to have up to 16GB of RAM and an additional 1TB hard disk drive. There’s also an option for a faster Core i7 processor.

The laptop has a 14 inch 1080p IPS screen that’s easy on the eyes, and thanks to its matte coating, doesn’t reflect much glare. The screen can also be tilted 180 degrees, which allows users to flat-lay the laptop on a table. This is a feature that could come in handy during a business huddle or a collaboration meeting when several people need to see what you are presenting on the screen. 

The screen however doesn’t swivel 360 degrees like in 2-in-1 models. You can’t use this notebook as a presentation screen, or a tablet like the Lenovo Yoga or Asus’ own Zenbook Flip and Vivobook Flip series. The screen also doesn’t support touch input nor does its trackpad function as an extra display like in Asus’ top-of-the-line notebook.

But what it lacks in bells and whistles, it makes up for in one feature that’s very important to a lot of business travelers: weight. The AsusPro weighed just 1.23 kg. As someone who was more used to lugging a 15-inch MacBook Pro, this notebook felt almost impossibly light. After using it for about 2 weeks, going back to my MacBook Pro felt like carrying a kettlebell. 

The AsusPro is even lighter than the MacBook Air, whose most affordable 13-inch version weighs 1.25 kgs. The only other laptop I could think of that was lighter is the 12-inch MacBook, which is 0.92 kgs. Tech pundits however have pointed out that these 2 lightweight laptops from Apple both scrimp on ports and require users to carry dongles for peripherals.

The AsusPro meanwhile gives business users numerous I/O ports. If you need to connect external drives, monitors, projectors, speakers or just look at the photos and videos from your camera, the AsusPro has you covered. You don’t need to lug around a lot of dongles to connect peripherals to this machine as it has 1 USB-C port, 2 USB-3 ports, 1 HDMI port, an SD card reader, a power port and an audio jack. 

But in case you need to connect to older projectors that require a VGA port, Asus also sells a dongle for that. 

Since this laptop can connect via the superfast 802.11ac Wifi, there isn’t much need for a LAN port. But if you need faster gigabit access or your office supports the slower 802.11bg or 802.11n standards, you can also get a LAN dongle for this laptop. 

Dongles aren’t the most convenient solution, but it would have been silly to accommodate too many legacy ports on a laptop designed to be as portable as this. 

Typing on the AsusPro was excellent. I loved the feel of writing on this laptop because the keys were soft without being too feathery, and the layout was just right--it didn’t feel cramped at all. 
In low-light conditions, users can also turn on the keyboard’s backlighting. There’s also a fingerprint scanner next to the trackpad for extra security. 

Asus claims a 10-hour battery life for this laptop. I was never able to verify this, but casual days of web browsing, writing and watching videos on this machine for around 3 hours still left it with about 65 percent battery life, so the official estimate is probably not too far from real world conditions. 

This laptop also has enough processing power and memory to handle photo editing. It can even do some light video editing for business presentations or stuff that need to be uploaded to social media sites. But I wouldn’t recommend it for professional video editors.

The AsusPro’s magnesium alloy body also feels sturdy enough to handle the rigors of business trips and daily use.

For professionals who need a lightweight laptop that packs enough power for demanding business tasks, the AsusPro is a very solid choice.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Apple-1 computer fetches $375,000 at auction

SAN FRANCISCO, United States -- An Apple-1, a rare model of the first computer produced by the now-iconic tech firm, fetched $375,000 in an auction this week, according to Boston-based RR Auction.

The computer was among 175 of those sold by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak from their production in a garage in Silicon Valley in the early days of Apple in 1976 and 1977.

The model originally went for $666.66 when it was sold by the Byte Shop computer store in Mountain View, California in the 1970s.

Jobs and Wozniak initially designed the Apple-1 as a bare circuit board to be sold as a kit and completed by electronics hobbyists, but Byte Shop owned Paul Terrell agreed to buy 50 if they were fully assembled and did not require soldering by the buyer.

According to RR, the computer sold this week was restored to original running condition in June and included the original Apple-1 board, a cassette interface, keyboard and other equipment.

The selling price was far from a record, however: another Apple-1 computer went for $905,000 in 2014.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Windows designer moves to new Microsoft job

SEATTLE - Julie Larson-Green, one of Microsoft Corp's most senior women executives and a leading force behind the latest design of Windows, is moving to a new job in charge of harmonizing the look and usability of Microsoft's wide range of software.

Larson-Green, who oversaw the design of Windows 7 and its less popular successor Windows 8, was promoted to run Microsoft's Devices and Studios group as part of former chief executive Steve Ballmer's sweeping reorganization of the company last July.

However, when Microsoft agreed to buy Nokia's handset unit only a few months later, Microsoft planned to put former Nokia boss Stephen Elop in charge of that group, with Larson-Green reporting to him.

Elop is still set to take over that group when the Nokia deal is completed, expected in the next few weeks, but with the move Larson-Green is no longer set to report to him.

"I'll remain in (the) role leading the DnS (Devices and Studios) organization in the interim until the Nokia deal closes and Stephen Elop makes his transition to Microsoft," said Larson-Green in an email to colleagues which was obtained by Reuters. The memo and job change were earlier reported by Seattle-area tech news site GeekWire.

The new job means Larson-Green, known for introducing the 'ribbon' bar to the Office suite of applications, returns to software-focused design after leading the Devices and Studios group which is centered on hardware such as the Xbox game console and Surface tablet.

Her official title will be Chief Experience Officer of the My Life & Work Team, which is part of Microsoft's Applications and Services Group, led by Qi Lu.

Larson-Green will lead efforts to ensure Microsoft's varied software has a harmonized interface across a range of devices, which has become a key function in the era of mobile computing, where a growing number of people use a wide variety of smartphones and tablets to work and play rather than a PC.

The move is the first significant executive change at Microsoft under new CEO Satya Nadella, who took over from Ballmer earlier this month.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Coming soon: World's lightest 13-inch notebook

TOKYO - NEC Personal Computers Ltd. said Tuesday it will launch in November in Japan the world's lightest 13.3-inch notebook personal computer weighing less than 800 grams.

The 795-gram LaVie Z, the remodeled version of a notebook PC released in summer last year, will hit the domestic market on Nov. 21 with an expected retail price of about 185,000 yen.

In developing the product, the company used magnesium-lithium alloy to make the product light. It is also equipped with a power-saving "Igzo" liquid crystal display manufactured by Sharp Corp.

A 13.3-inch notebook PC with a touch-panel screen weighing about 964 grams will also be available with an expected retail price of about 175,000 yen, according to the company.

NEC Personal Computers, owned by Lenovo NEC Holdings B.V., a joint venture established in 2011 by Lenovo Group and NEC Corp., engages in production and sales of NEC-brand PCs in Japan.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Computer whiz Aaron Swartz dead at 26

American computer programmer and Internet activist Aaron Swartz apparently hanged himself Friday in his New York apartment. He was 26.

Swartz, co-author of the initial RSS 1.0 online subscription tool and founder of the online group Demand Progress, was arrested last year for systematically downloading academic journal articles from the digital library JSTOR and breaking into computer networks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was charged with wire fraud and computer fraud and faced up to 35 years in prison and a fine of up to $1 million.

His family released a statement blaming overzealous prosecutors for his death.

"Aaron's commitment to social justice was profound, and defined his life. He was instrumental to the defeat of an Internet censorship bill; he fought for a more democratic, open, and accountable political system; and he helped to create, build, and preserve a dizzying range of scholarly projects that extended the scope and accessibility of human knowledge," the family statement said.

"Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney's office and at MIT contributed to his death. The U.S. Attorney's office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims," the statement said.

"Aaron built surprising new things that changed the flow of information around the world," Susan Crawford, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York who served in the Obama administration as a technology adviser, was quoted by The New York Times as saying. She called Swartz "a complicated prodigy" and said "graybeards approached him with awe."

source: upi.com