Ideas from Mark Stout

Apple’s announcement of the latest iPhone and a new Apple Watch was overshadowed by one feature of the new phone. Or rather, a feature removed from the phone. Gone is the headphone jack.  Instead,  iPhone 7  will come with earpods that connect through the phone’s lightning connector. Removing the old connector, which provided a hole into the body of the phone, improves the water resistance of the phone. Anyone who has ever dropped a phone into the sink (or worse!)  will appreciate that feature. What really upsets long time iPhone users though is this renders their huge collection of earbuds, headphones, remote speakers and such harder to use. Apple is including a dongle with the iPhone 7 that permits previous devices to work, but the dongle is an ugly appendage hanging off the phone, likely to break or get lost.  And replacement earbuds from Apple cost $29, the same as the old wired earbuds with the 3.5 mm plug that is now gone.  What is not ce...

September is a good geek month. Apple usually announces new iPhones and iPads this month; and they didn’t disappoint this year. And later in the month, Google is expected to announce new Nexus phones. The most interesting thing is Apple announced the iPad Pro, a 12.9-inch version. Standard iPads are 9.7 inches.  The Pro model is aimed at Microsoft’s Surface market – a powerful tablet with a near laptop-sized screen. It can be mated to a keyboard for a laptop-like experience. While the Surface runs Windows 10, the iPad Pro will run IOS. With Apple’s productivity software or Microsoft Word for the iPad, users can get a lot of work done. IOS was originally built as a phone operating system, but Apple has upgraded it to be closer to a PC OS. The iPad Pro starts at $799 for a 32-gigabyte model. The 128-gigabyte version is $949. A keyboard is $169. And the iPad Pro is the first iPad with a stylus. Steve Jobs said some disparaging things about products with styluses in the past, so wags c...

Apple had a few gifts for users.  The latest Family Tech column .

The two new iPhone's were not the only cell phones announced in September. Read about the iPhones and the others, in the  latest Family Tech .

Two days ago, January 24th, was the 30th anniversary of the now famous 1984 ad during the Superbowl announcing the first Apple Macintosh. According to news reports from last Friday, the Mac then hit the stores two day later, or thirty years ago today. It was on that day I had my geekiest moment in my long life and career in technology. Steve Jobs saw me demonstrating the Macintosh. I was recently at a tech meeting that had many Apple faithful in it.  We were asked to go around the room and each tell one interesting them about themselves. I told this story. I wrote a blog post about it five years ago on the 25th anniversary.  The link is here.

Apple introduced two new iPhones, and our town now has an Apple Store.  Open today! New Family Tech posted.

Family Tech for June 20 , made it to the web as well today.  There are new toys coming from Apple, Microsoft and Sony.  If you like Mac's, iPhones or game consoles, this is worth a read.

How Steve Jobs made things better for even those who never bought an Apple product, is the topic of this week's Family Tech column .

When the iPhone was released, Steve Jobs was asked if outside developers were going to be able to produce apps for it.  He replied that there was no need, that developers could produce HTML5 web apps and not need to access the phone. Primarily as I recall, he attributed it to the cell phone networks worrying about their networks security if outside apps could interact with their networks. Was he speaking the truth, or vamping until they could finish the developer tools and open the App Store?  He has a history of saying Apple had no intention of entering a market because it was not good for the customer, only to do so later. Now, the Apple App store and development tools are good money earners for Apple.  And they want to sweeten the deal for themselves by demanding apps can only have in-app-store purchasing where Apple then lays claim to 30% of the revenue. Not a big deal for game makers selling virtual weapons, but for Amazon and others sell...