The New Mac Pro

Well at WWDC Apple announced the new Mac Pro. This has taken a long time to come. The Mac Pro last received a major update in 2010 and in 3 years a lot can change in computer hardware. With the old Mac Pro sporting either a ATI HD Radeon 5770 or 5870 you feel that there was definitely need for an upgrade, however the upgrade of the Mac Pro was not just to the computer hardware but also to the overall look of the Mac Pro.

The new Mac Pro is an eighth of the size of the previous version but with even more power and comes in at 6.6" × 9.9" which is extremely tiny. The case is circular and, to me, looks rather like a bin but the engineering behind this is incredible. Inside "the bin" the motherboard is in a triangular arrangement around the exterior walls of the case. Astonishingly the case only has one fan and so will operate like a wind tunnel blowing air through the case and out the other end. This is really quite an amazing design feature and will make this mac very quiet, something I am always trying to achieve with my PC.
These are the specs are of the new Mac Pro and I will go into each one in more detail later on: dual Intel Xeon E5, dual Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI 1.4, Thunderbolt 2.0 with DisplayPort 1.2 support for up to three 4K displays, 802.11ac wireless, Bluetooth 4.0, 1866MHz ECC RAM, PCIe-based flash storage, and dual AMD FirePro GPUs with up to 6GB of VRAM.
It will come with dual Xeon E5 and up to 12 core configurations which suggests that there maybe a cheaper alternative model which only offers 6 cores. This is highly regarded processor and the next upgrade is due to come out this fall so the new Mac Pro will probably be shipping with that latest version.
A huge selling point for the new Mac Pro is the ability to support three 4K dispalys out of the box. This is remarkable but by the time that this is released will it be that huge? At the moment 4K displays are very expensive with the cheapest being over £1000 so buying 3 of them will most likely cost more than the Mac Pro itself. The price of 4K may come down over time but they will come down enough to make them attractive to the masses for a few years I believe. However people buying Mac Pros will not be the average buyer and will have quite a lot of money. This seems to me that Apple are making sure that they will not have to make another upgrade for another few years.
The graphics cards have finally been upgraded to, what we assume will be, the latest AMD FirePro GPUs. This will be a vast improvement but what is even better is that they will be shipping with 2 graphics cards. Again Apple has specified what the specs will be of the GPU and they have said "up to 6gb VRAM" which suggests again that there will be different versions of the Mac Pro and they will be customizable.
Apple have decided to do away with hard drives completely and with regular SSDs and they have decided to go PCIe-based flash storage. This will be much faster even than SATA SSDs witch have average speeds of 500Mb/s were as PCIe-based flash storage has average speeds of 1250Mb/s which is ridiculously fast.
AC is the latest innovation in wireless technology but is not that big yet as it pretty new and is not expected to be a common thing until 2015. The only other device I know that has this, and I only know this because I have it, is the HTC One. This is just a nice bit of future proofing from Apple.
While this computer has got some incredible specs such as supporting 3 4K monitors and the PCIe-based flash storage the main problem with the Mac Pro is the look of it. Apple have always done well with aesthetics of their products but I think that this time they have got it wrong. Not only does it look like a bin but it is also too small and too odd of a shape. The way that it is designed has meant that the motherboard has been put together in an strange way and this limits expandability. Maybe this is not the target market that Apple are going for but I think it will limit them a bit.

IOS 7 has been announced

Well today Apple announced IOS 7 amongst other things, which I will be covering some of, at WWDC but I will be giving you my take on IOS 7 today.
IOS 7 really changes the look of IOS and is the first change in the visual appearance of IOS since the iPhone was originally released. They have changed the way IOS looks and I have to say that I am not a huge fan of the new look. To me it looks rather cartoony compared to the old design.They have changed the appearance of all of the icons. The new design was predicted to be "flat" by many people and I think it is, but not in a good way. Apple are known for their innovation and I do not think that they have done a good job with this new look. I think it is rather flat and not very imaginative. What have they changed visually? The look screen, the icons, the font, and the signal bars. There are other significant changes that are not visual but I think they could have done a lot more to revamp IOS. I will not really know what I think of it until I get my hands on it but for the moment I am not a huge fan of the visual appearance, I think that they could have done more.


One of the things that I took away from the overview they gave us of IOS 7 today was that they have taken some things from Android and have put their Apple spin on it. One of these things is the lock screen; instead of the traditional slide to unlock we have become accustomed to with Apple devices they have now lost the slide to unlock bar that used to be and now just have the text and the arrows pointing upwards, similar to many Android devices. I am not sure why Apple have done this, I have never seen anything wrong with the slide to unlock and the only reason I can think of this is that they completely wanted to revamp IOS. Another feature they I feel that they have slightly taken inspiration from Android is their new multitasking. The multitasking on older versions of IOS left a lot to be desired I felt and was never true multitasking, however, their new multitasking, similar to Android, appears to be a lot better. Just like the previous version you double tap the home button and you enter the multitasking screen and, although Apple were not clear on this, it looked like you could see live previews of the apps and now supports all third apps which is a vast improvement and then you will be able to close apps by hitting the "x".

There are many new features in IOS 7, some of the great, some of them not. From what I have seen so far my favourite would have to be control centre. This is a great addition to IOS and this is something that has been missing from all mobile OS's I feel even though on Android you can get apps which do something similar it would be great to get something like this stock. Control centre allows you to swipe up from the bottom of your screen and quickly access many key features such as brightness, wi-fi, air plane mode, change your music track and other great things. This is a really convenient way of changing many things quickly efficiently and I feel this is one of the best additions to IOS 7.

Safari is another feature that has been updated for IOS 7 and appears to be quite a lot better. It opens up into full screen browsing and allows you to pull down the search bar. Another new feature is the new UI for tabs. Instead of the traditional bars at the top of safari underneath the search bar you now press the tab button and you are taken to a screen where you can browse through all your tabs similar to a vertical cover flow. It looks pretty nice but I still think that I prefer that the Chrome tabs, although it is a huge improvement.

Another major update that they have done in IOS 7 is the camera app. They have added filters, similar to Instagram, to give the photos a more "professional" look which I think I think is a nice feature and instead of having to tap a button to change what camera mode you are in such as HDR or panorama you just swipe across the page. I think this is a great addition as it allows users to quickly change between modes to get the photo that they desire quickly. Along with changes to the camera they have redesigned the photo app for the first time since the iPhone was released. The main introduction into the photos app is Moments which is a new way to organize your photos and videos based on time and location.When looking at the Moments screen you can zoom out and it will show you your photos organized by the collection and Moments and then if you zoom out again it will show all your photos from different years. I am not sure how I feel about this and will have to wait and see until I get my hands on it. You can also share photos by the iCloud now.

IOS 7 has also added a few other neat features. One of these being if you tilt your screen your background will rotate with it so it will remain flat whatever angle you are looking at it. It also responds to the background colour that you have by changing the colour of certain to that such as the unlock screen for your pass code. These are quite nice little features but nothing too big.

There were some other updates as well such as updates to the music apps and to Siri and the addition of air drop but I will not be covering these now.
I will not be able to get my hands onto IOS 7 until it is fully released as I am not a developer unfortunately. Thanks for reading and hope you enjoyed my take on IOS 7. Keep an eye out on my blog as I will covering other things that were announced at Apple's WWDC and also things that were announced at E3.