As hotly speculated, Apple announced its version of a music subscription service, iTunes Radio at WWDC on Monday. Apple may have been the one to bring purchased digital music to the masses with iTunes, but it had fallen behind in recent years with the crowded subscription streaming music services marketplace gaining customers' favor.
ITunes Radio will be built directly into iOS 7 mobile devices, Apple TV, and iTunes for Mac and PC, no new app download required. Over 200 stations are included in Radio, a mixture of those curated by Apple and genre-based. Integration with Siri was demonstrated during the keynote, with voice commands like "More like this" adding similar songs to a station, telling Siri to skip music, or adding a song to your iTunes purchase wish list.
Apple believes iTunes Radio will get to know your music tastes better than you do, growing stations and recommendations based on the songs you listen to, like/dislike, and download. Create a station based on a song you're listening to, even if it was uploaded to iTunes via CD.
Coming to the US this Fall, then moving on to other worldwide countries, iTunes Radio is free with ads or ad-free with the purchase of a $25 per year iTunes Match subscription. Customers that purchase Match can also store all their music in iCloud, which the recently announced Google Play Music All Access also offers.
Shipping today is Apple's latest version of the MacBook Air, packed with a heavy-duty battery that may finally last you all day even with the streaming movies and music that often drive battery life down. The 11-inch MacBook Air is now touted to have nine hours of battery life, and the 13-inch is going from seven to 12 hours of battery life.
The updated laptops have a fourth generation Intel core processor known as Haswell, along with faster AMD graphics and Flash memory. The 128GB 11-inch MacBook Air is priced at $999 and the 256GB model is $1199; the 13-inch MacBook Air starts at $1099 for 128GB and $1299 for 256GB.
Apple's biggest development to the hardware line came with a preview of the Mac Pro (the first image), a completely redesigned computer for power users like video editors and multimedia artists. Gone is the rectangular, silver chassis, and in its place is a glossy black cylinder. It will be able to support 4K video, the super hi-def display we saw a lot of at CES, and dual AMD FirePro graphics. Expect availability of the Mac Pro later this year along with pricing details.
Peep these three perfect little owls sitting by the Sydney bay. Instagram user casjumbo captured this beach vignette using the #coolcapture hashtag so well that it looks like it was a studio setup (but it's not!).
Have you been testing out your photography skills and snapped a shot you want to share? Submit your pics to our Cool Capture group or to Instagram with the #coolcapture hashtag, and your pic might be featured on the POPSUGAR Tech homepage. And don't forget to follow @popsugartech on Instagram!
For most iPhone owners, it's a gadget nightmare: that smooth aluminum slips through your fingers and down to the ground goes the app marvel — onto a pointed rock. Many hope they signed up for monthly insurance, while others trust the replacement screen won't cost too much. Still, some that have met the fate of a cracked iPhone choose to make the most of the broken glass by channeling their creative side. Take a look at the #crackediphone tag on Instagram, and you'll see bright white casings turned to rainbow streams.
YouTube even has tutorials on turning a trashed iPhone into a Lisa Frank work of art. For those wondering: use markers, highlighters, or food coloring to color in the cracks, then wipe away the excess with a paper towel.
It's a bit shocking to see gadgets that cost over $600 decorated in a way that doesn't fit their minimalist nature. Is this making the best of a bad situation (and perhaps too delicate of exteriors) with the status-symbol phone? Or is it gadget abuse? Whatever side you take on the art that is cracked iPhone glass, click on for the images that make the practice seem, dare we say, fun.
A love of photography may have brought us to Instagram in the beginning, but the users that have us currently addicted to the photo-sharing app are artists of a different medium: illustrators. Get a peek into the creative process, works in progress, and enchanting final pieces of these masters of pen, ink, watercolor, pencil, and even sharpie marker. From fashion forms to deceptively delicate science-fiction scenes to pugs on a tropical getaway, prepare those fingers to wear out Instagram's heart button.
Don't worry about searching the far corners of the social network for inspiration — we took care of that! Get motivated to create with a look at the eight illustrators we love on Instagram (and don't forget to hit Follow).
The tech world got a major jolt this week when it was discovered that the National Security Agency, a government group, had required Verizon to turn over metadata on all of its customers. Catch up on how this news could affect you, along with the more lighthearted headlines of the last few days, in our tech recap.
Instagram user cyrenakh caught an unforgettable French sunset, which was shared using the #CoolCapture hashtag.
Have you been testing out your photography skills and snapped a shot you want to share? Submit your pics to our Cool Capture group or to Instagram with the #coolcapture hashtag, and your pic might be featured on the POPSUGAR Tech homepage. And don't forget to follow @popsugartech on Instagram!
It's the modern home gadget dilemma: when investing in new tech, should you go for the computing power of a laptop or the go-anywhere convenience of a tablet? With so many options for portable devices out there, it's hard to know which one will suit your needs best.
Find out if a PC or tablet is right for you on today's episode of The Sync Up with Veronica Belmont!
WWDC, every Apple fangirl's favorite event of the year for the slew of news Apple unveils, kicks off in less than a week. Before festivities even begin, Apple's latest release, a free app to navigate the conference, may also serve as a clue on what to expect from the upcoming updates to iOS 7. Registered Apple developers can sign in to the app for maps of the venue, Moscone West in San Francisco; watch sessions and keynotes; and organize their event schedule. Basic, but absolutely handy for attendees.
What the app shows rather than says could be the rumored "black, white, and flat all over" look coming to iOS 7. Similar to recent design we've seen in Google Now and Windows 8, the WWDC app emphasizes clean lines, a bright white interface, and less-rounded corners galore.
We'll have to wait until the June 10 keynote to see exactly what Apple has in store for its mobile operating system, but if this is a sign of what's to come, then we're fans. Would you like iOS 7 have a similar feel to the WWDC app?
Take a peek at the photo of walk-friendly Burano Island, an island a short trip from Venice, Italy. World traveler and Instagram user, laurentrekk, shared this picture with the #coolcapture hashtag.
Have you been testing out your photography skills and snapped a shot you want to share? Submit your pics to our Cool Capture group or to Instagram with the #coolcapture hashtag, and your pic might be featured on the POPSUGAR Tech homepage. And don't forget to follow @popsugartech on Instagram!
Love is all you need . . . and a groovy Beatles lunch box doesn't hurt. This lovely photo was submitted with the #coolcapture hashtag on Instagram by user lunalestrange.
Have you been testing out your photography skills and snapped a shot you want to share? Submit your pics to our Cool Capture group or to Instagram with the #coolcapture hashtag, and your pic might be featured on the POPSUGAR Tech homepage. And don't forget to follow @popsugartech on Instagram!
Showing off photos on a phone can be so cold and, well, electronic. There was a certain charm to a classroom history lecture based on the click-click-click of a turning slide projector tour of ancient Greece. Meet nostalgia digitized with the Projecteo ($26), a tiny Instagram projector funded as a Kickstarter project.
Created by Mint Digital, the creative minds behind Foldable.me and Stickygram, the itty-bitty projector is made up of an LED light and three watch-size batteries to make sharing photos an analog snap. From the Projecteo website, users pick nine Instagram images to develop onto a piece of 35mm film, which is then cut into a perfect circle to fit inside the projector's corresponding mini reel, each of which is $9.
Like a classic slide projector, images are focused with a slight turn of the lens barrel, and the product's tiny size has no bearing on the quality of the projected photo since no digital worries like pixels are involved.
Watch the story behind Projecteo after the break.
It may have been a short business week, but tech companies still packed in new product launches and major interviews. We also took a look at the future of architecture and a natural phenomenon that could only be seen by citizens of Manhattan. Catch up with the news of the week now!
Female comic-book characters don't often get the spotlight they deserve — or when they do, it's a spotlight filled with suggestive poses, as we've seen in The Hawkeye Initiative. This week, women take over saving-the-world duties in Marvel's release of X-Men #1, a reboot of Professor Xavier's mutant hero squad, with a cast exclusively of the XX chromosome.
Editor Jeanine Schaefer and writer Brian Wood chose the "best of the best characters" from the X-Men universe to star in the series: Storm, Rogue, Kitty Pryde, Rachel Grey, and Psylocke. The story begins with the team protecting a child Jubilee brought home who could make or break Earth, while contending with an alien invasion. Just another day on the job, right?
Each purchased paper issue of the book also comes with a code for a free digital edition using the Marvel Comics app on iOS and Android. Read on for an excerpt of the first issue of the all-female X-Men team.
