iPhone 5 first impressions

Still have my iPhone 4, but went to the Apple store to check out the iPhone 5. It sounded great, but not too great, but I was wrong.

The first thing you notice is how light it is. It makes the iPhone 4 seem heavy, but it still feels well built and solid. And the mostly metal back is much better than the glass iPhone 4 and 4S. The phone is thinner, and lighter, and taller.

The taller screen looks better even at the same resolution. And the bigger screen is just better. Wide screen shows look great and having an extra row of apps on every screen is fantastic.

And the lightning connector is impressively small. Still if it is not faster, it sucks to make every previous accessory either incompatible or have to work with an adapter.

if all of the speed tests are true, this is a really impressive phone. I so want one! Ha!

How crappy is Apple’s new Lightning Adapter

So with the iPhone 5 Apple updated and downgraded it’s connector to the new lightning connector. The good news is it is smaller, and will work in either direction. The bad news is it is the same speed as the old adapter, sends less data, so many old accessories won’t work, and for those that do it requires an adapter at $28 for a direct or $39 for a cable.

Youch! Honestly i would rather have had the old adapter still so all my old devices would work. Especially since Apple said they won’t make docks for the iPhone 5, and i prefer my iPhone and iPods in docks!

Anyone else lament the loss of development of hard drive based music players like the iPod Classic?

Sure I have an iPhone and an iPad, but even with the largest models of their generations and a bunch of apps 64 GB doesn’t leave much room for music. Not only that but I rip all my CD’s at Apple Lossless, which is about half the size of CD quality with no loss of quality. That leaves me with my venerable iPod Classic with 120 GB harddrive (there was once a bigger model, but it is no more). Still not huge, especially with hard drives growing every year, but sans a plethora of apps it can store quite a bit of music. And there is nothing else that matches it’s size. Sure eventually static memory will get larger, but so does app size as screens get better. And don’t even get me started in how much space large photos take up on the new iPad!?!?!

And streaming music doesn’t work for me as long as data plans have caps. And even most unlimited plans are not even close to unlimited! As streaming could be the future, but only if it can be all your songs just as they are in your computer!

I know it will never happen, but i would love a new hard drive based ipod, say 320GB, with an updated interface. It can still be scroll wheel, but playlists needs a fast scroll like artists have! It could store most of my music and mean i can just worry about apps on my iOS devices!

Apple announces a new iPod Touch

iPodTouch

Apple has released a new iPod touch based on the iPhone 5, but still missing a true GPS, with a 5 Megapixel isight camera, but still a 720P Facetime HD camera.

Still at starting at $299 since it is not subsidized it is expensive!

Apple has announced the iPhone 5 coming out next week

iPhone

And they didn’t name it the next iPhone, which is even better. It has a powerful quad core A6 processor and a taller screen, which allows one more row of icons, or bigger 1135 by 640 16×9 apps, which is great for watching movies and old apps show up as letterboxed instead of stretched. It has a better 8 Megapizel camera, and it’s towards you camera is now 720p for facetime. It has a new connector called Lightning that should be faster and is much smaller, but will require all new accessories or adapter cables.

Nothing revolutionary, but certainly very cool. I would love to replace my iPhone 4 with one, but it is not going to happen. Too broke after surgery and possible not having work for a while. It is $199, $299 or $499 for 16, 32 or 64 GB versions.

Does anyone else think the new iTunes looks awful?

Today as Apple announced the iPhone 5, new iPod Touch and Nano and iOS release next week, they also showed off a new version of iTunes which is a complete revamp, and I am scared, very scared.

As with OS X it seems to be getting dumber.

It looks like you have to look via album covers, instead of a text list, which is not convenient for someone with as big of a library as I have (I can’t even get an iCloud account as it won’t fit). And how does that work for playlists? Is that still a list?

I am not saying iTunes doesn’t need help, but I want a nice list view for things, and not have to use album covers! Hell many of my playlists are random, so they don’t have covers anyway!

I would also like to see the music sync window for iPods, as that has been a peave of mine and needed an update, but the site says nothing about how it works.

Honestly I am scared that this new version will cut down on functionality and only be for the lowest common denominator!

Please apple keep list views for those of us with huge libraries.

NVIDIA announces Kepler based Quadro K5000 GPU for Mac Pro!!!! This is huge for CUDA users!

quadro-k5000-mac-front

Arstechnica has the news on this HUGE announcement. The K5000 is the replacement for the QUADRO 5000 and runs at $2249. You check it out at NVIDIA as well.

Built around NVIDIA’s latest “Kepler” architecture, the double-wide card boasts 1536 processing cores shuffling pixels at up to 173GB/s along a 256-bit path to 4GB of GDDR5 memory. The card supports Shader Model 5.0, Open GL 3.2 on Mac OS X, and Open GL 4.3 and DirectX 11 when running Windows under BootCamp. And, it can support up to four monitors: two running at 2560×1600 over dual-link DVI ports, and two running up to 4096×2160 over DisplayPort 1.2. All that power also fits within an Energy Star-rated 122W power envelope.

This has serious CUDA performance and should be awesome for Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve 9.

Even more exciting for us not quite able to afford such a behometh card is that it signals some changes from Apple and Drivers. As you can actually run many Kepler cards now without much effort, since they included the drivers to deal with the NVIDIA powered MacBookPro and NVIDIA has started just writing a single driver for all cards in a series instead of different drivers. The thing is as of now you can only see 2GB of RAM on a card without doing some fiddling, which is an arbitrary addition made by Apple. The 4GB of RAM in this card looks like this will soon change for the better. And hopefully we get some Kepler GeForce cards running at full power on the mac soon. Like a GeForce GTX 680 (which matches the 1536 CUDA cores of the QUADRO) with slightly higher memory bandwidth.

Any way you look at this it is good news for high end mac graphics as it looks like NVIDIA is back and here to stay.