The Apple Watch Series 2, which was announced at yesterday's keynote, is Apple's answer to improving on what was already one of the best-selling smartwatches on the market today.
In this piece, we'll recap all the technical specifications of the new Apple Watch lineup.
The iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are Apple's latest and greatest handsets that will be going on pre-order Friday, September 9th, and will be available for official purchase starting on September 16th.
Of course, before you go out and buy something new, it's always great to do a little research on the hardware specs. In this piece, we'll recap the specs of both Apple's iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus.
Apple's iPhone lineup just got even better as of Wednesday's product unveiling. Not only are the devices super fast, more power-efficient, and available in new finishes, but they also come with a slew of new finishes that owners of previous-generations of iPhone will drool over.
In this piece, we'll compare the iPhone 7 to the iPhone 6s so you have an idea of the differences in size, weight, and even their expected battery life.
Apple's new iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are each powered by a powerful A10 Fusion system on a chip that is not only faster than any iPhone ever made, but also significantly more power efficient.
Geekbench, a popular hardware benchmarking app for various platforms by Primate Labs, has been updated to version 4.0 on Tuesday.
The update brings enhancements to the look of the UI and adds a number of new benchmarks to help you get an idea of how fast your computer or mobile device really is.
Ars Technica reported this morning that Apple is in “advanced talks” regarding a possible takeover of British fabless semiconductor maker Imagination Technologies. The chip designer develops GPU blueprints that other companies license and incorporate into their own chips.
Apple owns at least a 9.5 percent stake in Imagination and has long used their PowerVR line of graphics-processing units (GPU) inside its own A-series processors since the emergence of the A4 chip, which powered the original iPad, the iPhone 4 and the fourth-generation iPod touch.
One of the great things about Final Cut Pro X ($299 on Mac App Store) is that you can export high quality videos extremely fast, even on underpowered hardware. For example, my Late 2013 MacBook Pro with Retina display lacks a discrete GPU, but I can still export 4K videos with relative ease.
Some of the speed can be attributed to a technology of Intel's called Quick Sync Video. Quick Sync is a hardware accelerator for H.264 encoding. It's baked into Intel's consumer line of chips, so ironically, it doesn't apply to the beefier Mac Pro. Those machines are powered by professional grade Xeon chips that lack integrated graphics.
That means that even the 12" MacBook, which is the most anemic piece of Intel-powered hardware currently available from Apple, can export 4K videos competently.
With all of that said, there are some things that you should know in order to fully take advantage of faster video encoding when exporting projects with Final Cut Pro X, and you can learn more in this post.
Apple is making its own GPU to cut the cord from Imagination Technologies and has been secretly developing its own GPU in-house for a few years now. That's what a sketchy rumor published Thursday by Fudzilla contends, citing sources in the graphics industry.
An in-house-designed GPU would let Apple reduce the cost of its own mobile chipsets further. More importantly, such a move would help it advance the iPhone and iPad's graphics capabilities beyond what Imagination's designs (that Apple licenses) permit.
For end users, this should result in an even smoother iOS and flashier graphics in games (the overhyped term “console-quality” comes to mind) with more realistic special effects.
When OS X 10.11 El Capitan launches this fall, it will feature Metal, a graphics framework Apple originally introduced for iPhones, iPads and iPods following the release of iOS 8 last fall. In addition to making El Capitan's user interface and apps perform smoother than before, Metal for Mac is absolutely huge news for game developers and makers of graphics-intensive apps.
Like on iOS, El Capitan's Metal significantly reduces the overhead of graphics frameworks such as OpenGL by enabling low-level access to your Mac's graphics subsystem. Photo apps, games and video editing software like Adobe After Effects will experience up to ten times faster draw call performance by offloading certain tasks from the CPU onto the GPU.
But does your Mac sport modern hardware needed to support Metal's features? It's dead simple to determine this for yourself, here's how.
Demoed at WWDC back in June to show off the power of Apple's new low-level graphics framework, Metal, Epic Games' Zen Garden is now available to download on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices running iOS 8 and powered by the Apple-deigned A7 or A8 processor.
Built on the recently-unveiled Unreal Engine 4, the first game engine with built-in support for the Metal API, Zen Garden classes as a technological showcase.
The latest iPhone 6, for example, renders the demo in a whopping 1,440-by-1,080 resolution at a smooth thirty frames per second.
Imagination Technologies, a fabless UK-based semiconductor maker, has been supplying PowerVR-branded mobile graphics IP for Apple's in-house designed iDevice chips since the iPhone's inception.
Detailed 3D graphics, speedy animations and smooth performance have always been one of the hallmarks of the iPhone and iPad so it's no surprise that Apple is an investor in Imagination.
Following Imagination's announcement of a next-generation PowerVR GX6650 GPU that promises to smoke graphics giant Nvidia's own Tegra K1 mobile processor, Imagination yesterday said it is taking PowerVR graphics architecture to the next level by adding ray-tracing capabilities.
Apple likely won't utilize this technique in its upcoming A8 chip for the iPhone 6 and 2014 iPads because Imagination's technology won't be making its way into products until 2015.
This means that come 2015, your iPhone and iPad could easily give dedicated game consoles a good run for their money graphics-wise, by supporting high-quality lighting and shadows, accurate transparency and photorealistic reflections...
Apple's been using GPU parts from Imagination Technologies since switching to its own in-house designed iOS device processors, starting with the iPhone 3Gs in 2009. This UK-based firm does not churn out actual chips. Instead, it licenses out its GPU designs and intellectual property to vendors like Apple, Intel, Qualcomm and many others - that's why "they" call it a fabless semiconductor maker.
Now, Apple's engine that powers iOS devices typically combines Imagination's GPU and ARM's CPU blueprints with some memory, I/O logic and other supporting functions on a single die, a solution known in the semiconductor industry as a system-on-a-chip (SoC).
Moreover, both Apple and Intel own a stake in Imagination, another indication of its importance to Apple's mobile future. See, Imagination's PowerVR graphics processors coupled with Apple's efficient mobile operating system have been largely responsible for the smooth graphics, transitions and animations seen throughout iOS. It's the reason iOS is the smoothest mobile OS out there.
At CES earlier this year, Imagination unveiled a new GPU that we suspect should make its way into upcoming iOS devices. Today, the company is detailing some of its more intricate aspects and boy does it make our hearts sing: it supports 4K resolutions and outperforms even Nvidia's upcoming Tegra K1, apparently enabling the most powerful graphics yet in mobile phones and tablets...