Apple Pegged To Bring Force Touch Pressure-Sensitive Input To Next iPhones

 Apple’s Force Touch tech, which it built into both the new 12-inch MacBook and the new Apple Watch, is also headed to the next iPhone, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal. Frankly, after trying the tech out in person, I’d be more surprised it wasn’t using Force Touch across all of its upcoming products. The pressure-sensitive input method allows for a deeper press to be detected as a secondary type of input vs. a standard one, which could open up a lot of options for a completely touch-based smartphone.

The Force Touch trackpad on the new MacBook (and the new 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display) acts and feels like a normal, mechanical Mac trackpad, with a satisfying click when pressed, but in fact its motion is limited to around less than one nanometer of travel, supplanting the downward motion with a very fine side-to-side haptic motor agitation that is impossible to register as anything else than a press. This allows you to press once for a normal click, and then press a second, deeper time following the first to access a secondary function or perform some other action, without having to right-click or open a menu.

On an iPhone, you can see a lot of the potential benefits of using this kind of tech. It wold allow for new control capabilities for games, for instance, and could help make for much more sophisticated input response in apps like Garage Band, where being able to detect the difference between a light and a hard press could translate to different sounds produced by a virtual keyboard. Apple already kind of does this with Garage Band, but it’s a far less sensitive mechanism, which basically uses the iOS device’s motion sensor to register big differences in tap pressure.

Apple showed how Force Touch on new MacBook trackpads enables handwriting input with subtle pressure detection. That kind of input capability on an iPhone or iPad could also open up options for drawing, painting and other creative apps. There are now a number of Bluetooth stylus accessories that mimic pressure sensitivity in certain apps, but Force Touch could allow for more of that to be built into the hardware, and made available to developers at the system level.

The WSJ report doesn’t say if Apple will add the kind of clicky taptic feedback to the iPhone that it has used on the MacBook trackpad at the same time as it introduces pressure detection, but this might be the time for Apple to finally employ those kinds of haptic for things like keyboard clicks on its upcoming device. The taptic hardware is incredibly thing and space-conserving, and the response it provides almost can’t be compared with traditional vibration motors used in haptic systems, in terms of how subtle and senses-baffling it performs in real life. Haptics have never seemed right for an iPhone, but tactics are a different story.

As for other details on upcoming hardware, WSJ says new iPhones (likely coming in fall, as usual) will resemble the current ones in size options, but may actually add a pink (!) metallic aluminum case option, which is currently being tested. I’d expect them to color match the finishes on the Apple Watch Edition before they went in that direction, but this could be another facet of their expanded attempts to offer greater personalization options.

The Equil Smartmarker Records Everything You Write

t’s been just over five months since we checked out the Equil Smartpen, a gadget that lets you record your notes and doodles to the cloud and even convert them to text. Today we’re checking out their new Smartmarker, which does the same thing but on any erasable surface.

Out of the box, the two most important gadgets are the plastic body that holds your marker and the base station that records your work. It can “see” what you’re working on for eight feet to the left and to the right, giving you plenty of space to work in knowing it’ll all be saved for later.

Writing with the Smartmarker feels like working with any other erasable marker because that’s exactly what you’re doing — instead of including a proprietary ink cartridge you have to swap out every few weeks, the Equil lets you drop in any marker you’d pick up in a 12-pack for a few bucks at Staples.

Instead of packing a bunch of smart guts into the marker itself, most of the work is handled by the base station. It’s got storage for somewhere around 1,000 whiteboards worth of notes, and connects to your phone, tablet, or laptop over Bluetooth.

With that said, there are some nifty functions on the marker itself. Towards the non-writing end of each marker case, there’s a small ring of blue, red or black. This is actually an interchangeable piece of plastic that determines the color “ink” used for the digital notes, so if you want notes by different people to show up more distinctly, you can have them use different color rings.

For those who frequently misspell or have trouble drawing straight lines, there’s also a smart eraser cap for the marker that wipes your work away from both the physical surface and the file in the Equil Note app. There will also be a separate eraser “puck” to do the same thing if you need to wipe bigger swaths of notes away quickly.

Speaking of the app, a new Note Stream feature could be what makes the Smartmarker a must-have for some teams. While you’re writing on the whiteboard, you can now have the app send recordings of notes to other Equil users in near real-time.

This allows for conference calls with whiteboarding for drawing out concepts without requiring everyone to use a teleconferencing app that looks like it was made by a mediocre Java engineer with a long checklist of features to include and no real grasp on UX. And when you’re done, you can sync all of those notes to the team’s Dropbox or Google Drive for easy record keeping.

Meet Google’s New Chromebook Pixel

Google’s Chromebook Pixel has always been an aspirational machine meant to show off Chrome OS at its best. The new version, which Google announced today, continues this tradition.
 If you were hoping for a complete redesign, you’ll be disappointed, but just like the old Pixel, the new Pixel is the best Chromebook money can buy. And at the new starting point of $999, it’s a better value, too.

Google has kept the best from the original Pixel and improved all of the issues we found with the first one — battery life being the most important of those.

Let’s get the basics out of the way first. The new Pixel will come in two variants: a $999 Core i5 (2.2 GHz Broadwell-U) version with 8GB of RAM (up from 4GB in the original) and a 32GB SSD, and a $1,299 Core i7 “LS” version (2.4 GHz Broadwell-U) with 16GB of RAM and a 64GB SSD. Both use Intel’s HD Graphics 5500 GPU and weigh in at 3.3 lbs. Even Google admits that the LS edition (which it says stands for “ludicrous speed”) may be overkill for most, but he also noted that developers will surely find ways to do interesting things with this additional power.

Both of these new models are Wi-Fi-only. This time around, there are no LTE models. As a Google spokesperson told me, the company found that most people were tethering to their phones and the company wanted to “put resources elsewhere.”

Both of the new models are now available in the U.S. Google’s new online hardware store. The company hasn’t announced when the new Pixel will be available internationally, but we know it will be available in the UK in about a month’s time.

The first time you see the updated Chromebook Pixel, you’ll probably wonder if Google changed anything on the machine. On the outside, it looks almost exactly like the old one, with its understated aluminum housing and thin LED lightbar at the top of the lid.

There are a few very small differences compared to the first version: The color of the metal housing is now a bit lighter, and the bottom of the laptop is kept off the ground with two lines of rubber at the front and back instead of four small nubs. But that’s it.

“We wanted to remain very honest to what we are trying to achieve,” Andrew Bowers, Google’s director of consumer hardware, told me when I asked him why Google decided to mostly stick with the original design. And that’s fair enough. Even today, the Pixel’s design looks pretty up-to-date and nobody is going to confuse it with a MacBook Air (it’s also too thick for that, though it’s now maybe a millimeter thinner than the original).

When you open the Pixel, you also won’t see any major changes, either. It still features the same good — and in my view slightly improved — keyboard, as well as the same beautiful (but also highly reflective) high-density 2560 x 1700 12.95-inch touchscreen display with a pixel density of 239 ppi (that’s a total of 4.3 million pixels).

It’s the inside of the Pixel that has been completely revamped. It now features a far more powerful 5th-generation Intel i5 processor. On Google’s Octane benchmark, the base model of the new Pixel scored 24,392 points compared to 21711 I got on the old one.

In daily usage, you probably won’t immediately notice this faster processor, but what you will notice is that the laptop remains cool at all times. The old Pixel would heat up pretty quickly under even the lightest load and the rather loud fans would kick in to cool it down. The new Pixel now has two fans, but I still haven’t been able to get them to kick in during normal usage.

Unlike Google’s earliest attempt at making its own Chromebook back in 2010, the Pixel still features a very responsive touchpad, too (and there’s no silliness around “Force Touch” here either).

Battery life and USB Type-C charging

Also improved is the Pixel’s battery life. While the old one would die after about five hours, Google claims the new one will run for about 12 hours. I haven’t quite been able to match that in the week I spent with the device, but I have been able to get about 10 hours of work done before I had to plug it in. Thanks to that, you could easily get through a full workday with the new Pixel and get in an hour or two of couch browsing.

To get to this kind of battery life, Google employed a couple of interesting strategies. The screen now uses content-adoptive backlight, for example, and it features a relatively new technology called panel self-refresh, which allows the GPU to save a bit of power when there isn’t a lot of fast-moving content on the screen. The keyboard backlight, too, will dim when you don’t use it for more than 30 seconds and then automatically turns on again when you start typing.

You could easily get through a full workday with the new Pixel and still get in an hour or two of couch browsing.

The new Pixel now features a nifty fast-charging mode. With this, you can get about two hours of battery life out of a 15-minute charge. So when you are sitting at the airport and your Pixel is about to run out of juice because you forgot to charge at home, you can still get a decent amount of power into the battery before you board your plane (assuming you can find power, of course…). Charging the whole laptop takes about an hour-and-a-half.

The most interesting thing is how you charge, though. The Pixel now uses reversible USB Type-C ports on the left and right of the device, making this the first Chromebook — and of the first laptops in general — to support this next-gen version of USB.

Apple made a big deal about the new Type-C ports on its new Macbook earlier this week. But this is obviously an industry standard that many companies worked on, including Google, and it’s nice to see the industry come together to support this instead of the proprietary solutions that have dominated the laptop world for too long.

“I think the real innovation that debuting here is the idea of universal charging,” Bowers told me. Nobody wants to carry around half a dozen different types of chargers every day, after all. Google’s product manager for the Pixel Adam Rodriguez also noted that now that most phones have standardized on micro-USB chargers (except for our friends at Apple, of course), it’s time something similar happened for laptops, too. USB Type-C can provide up to 100W of power. That’s enough for a high-end laptop, and because there are a lot of smarts in this system, the charger can easily step down to provide power to smartphones, too.

Google is getting the details right here.

Type-C, of course, isn’t just about charging. It can also support displays and other peripherals through connectors. Google itself is launching a couple of these, including Type-C to USB, HDM and DisplayPort adapters. And because this is Google, the company is open-sourcing the hardware schematics of its adapters. Google provided us with a range of USB and display adapters for Display Port and HDMI. Suffice to say, they worked as promised. Google will charge $12.99 for its Type-C to the standard USB A plug cable and adapters. Adapters for HDMI and DisplayPort will cost $39.99.

Touch screen

Just like the first Pixel, the new one also features a touch-enabled, high-resolution display. There are no major changes here, but Google says it has the new screen shows more vibrant colors thanks to an improved sRGB color gamut.

I’ve used the original Pixel quite a bit, but I never really found the touch screen to be a major selling point. It works as expected, but I never really found myself drawn to it except for occasionally scrolling down a long page when I’m sitting on the couch. Maybe this will change, though, now that Google is bringing more Android apps to Chrome OS.

Chrome OS is starting to feel more like a fully featured operating system.

The one thing I don’t like about the screen is how reflective it is. In many situations, you can deal with that by bringing up the screen brightness (though you sacrifice battery life then), but this isn’t a laptop you want to work on outside when the sun is shining.

What I am a big fan of, however, is that Google stuck to its guns and kept the 3:2 aspect ratio. While 16:9 or 16:10 is pretty much the standard now, I much prefer having a higher screen over a wider one. There is still enough screen real estate for those who want to do so, especially if you turn up the display resolution to a still very usable 1600 x 1062. At the maximum native resolution of 2560 x 1700, things get a little bit small for my eyes.

Lightbar

The lightbar on the lid of the Pixel is still its most distinct design element, but with this update, Google has also brought some functionality to it. When the lid is closed, you can now tap on the laptop and the lightbar will show you the current battery level. It’s a small feature, but it shows that Google is getting the details right here. Unlike in the previous version, the lightbar now also stays illuminated while you’re using the laptop.

Still the best Chromebook money can buy

If Chrome OS feels limited, you can always run Ubuntu on it and get all the benefits of the hardware without the limitations of Chrome OS. Thanks to Google’s recent updates, though, Chrome OS is starting to feel more like a fully featured operating system — even when you’re not online. You still have to content with the limited hard disk space, but for many developers — who are the target market for this machine —  disk space is less of an issue than processor power and battery life.

Google will be the first to admit that a high-end Chromebook has limited market appeal. Just like with the old Pixel, it’s probably best to judge it for what it is: a great ChromeBook and a price that (now) seems pretty fair for the hardware quality you get.

SteamOS Hits Major Milestone

Steam now boasts more than 1,000 gaming titles for Linux, and therefore, SteamOS. Everything from indie games to AAA titles are available from the service. Best yet, even more titles are regularly popping up, with 14 games launching this week alone.

Steam launched its Linux efforts in early 2013 with just 50 games and took a year to hit 500 titles. Now the game count is at 1004 and climbs to 1835 if downloadable content like DLCs and expansion packs are included.

Linux has never been considered a gaming platform. In its early days the open source operating system was simply too fragmented for developers to keep up. Then Valve came along and announced that its Steam platform would support Linux.

Valve announced SteamOS seven months after launching Linux titles on Steam. This was Valve’s answer to gaming consoles. Yet it faced a major hurdle in that it was based on Linux and therefore the breadth of the games available on Steam wouldn’t be playable.

That was two years ago and SteamOS is still alive albeit only one of Valve’s living room solutions. Announced earlier this month, Steam Link promises to allow gamers the ability to stream PC games to a Chromecast-like device. The gaming company also announced a VR solution that gathered accolades at a recent gaming conference.

As Valve keeps developing SteamOS, more computer makers are jumping on board. Several new SteamOS machines were unveiled several weeks ago. And at the clip compatible games are becoming available, buyers will have plenty of options when the machines ship later this year. 

This USB Drive Can Nuke A Computer

Do not ever use a random USB flash drive. There are plenty of software exploits that can ruin your computer or life. And with this flash drive, it can physically destroy your computer by blasting a load of voltage to the USB controller with negative voltage. Think Wile E. Coyote and an ACME Human Cannon. BOOM!

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Put simply, the bits inside the USB drive draws and stores a ton of power. When a certain level is hit, it returns the power to the source, which is either a dedicated USB controller or the CPU itself. This is bad news bears. The amount of power returned overloads the circuits, rendering it useless. Since a lot of USB controllers are built directly into the main processor… bye bye computer.

Scary. Thankfully the creator hasn’t released the schematic for the drive.

There are enough USB exploits floating around to warrant caution. Some will unknowingly install malware or backdoor software, and now, there is at least one, that will actually destroy your computer. It’s straight out of Colin Farrell spy movie and a fantastic argument for Apple’s vision of the future. 

Latest OS X Beta Includes Support For Force Click And Pressure Sensitivity For Drawing Apps

Apple’s latest beta for developers for OS X 10.10.3 adds some new tools that will be available to third-party software developers targeting owners of the upcoming 12-inch MacBook and the new 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro. These include support for new Force Click secondary pressure-based input, support for accelerator features that translate amount of pressure into subtle changes in the speed of functions like fast forward in media applications, and add pressure sensitivity for drawing and graphics software.

The new tools also include a new drag-and-drop mechanism, whereby developers can use a Force Click deeper press to trigger the launch of an automatic destination for a selected piece of content. Apple already showed how Force Click can be used in its own applications and across the OS to do things like open up Wikipedia articles related to words in any field of text, but it seems like developers will be able to make use of these tools to have Force Click trigger the functions that are most relevant to the app at hand, on a software-specific basis.

Apple’s support for pressure sensitivity, with specific mention of drawing and creative software, is one thing that struck me as particularly interesting in my early experience with the new Mac trackpads. Apple says in its release notes for this beta that devs can specifically use the pressure sensitive to adjust line weight depending on how hard a user is pressing, so with either a pen input or a finger it seems like this could act as a small-scale, but powerful drawing tablet in a pinch.

Other cool potential features: scrubbing video at variable speed depending on how soft or hard you tap. There’s also lots of potential for gaming, too, so it’ll be very interesting to see what kind of things third parties do with these new capabilities. 

Apple Expediting The Future Is No Betrayal

Apple’s new MacBook, which limits input and output to a single USB-C port and a simple 3.5mm audio in/out jack, has been characterized by some as a move that’s antagonistic to the consumer. Critics point to the single port, as well as the performance limitations inherent in using an Intel Core M chipset for power management and fanless logic board design, as causes for complaint, and in some cases as causes for nearly inchoate rage.

But in truth, the new MacBook is nothing short of the future, delivered ahead of schedule and without exorbitant cost, with a bright neon “OPTIONAL” sign flashing overhead.

The new MacBook is an engineering showcase, inside and out, top to bottom. That doesn’t mean it’s the best computer available in Apple’s lineup for any given consumer: It is designed for a specific audience, and it’s designed to anticipate the growth of that audience in the years to come. In many ways, Apple’s new MacBook will appeal to the same crowd that is just fine using an iPad as their primary computer, and judging by the cumulative success of the iPad since its introduction, as well as the general trend of the PC industry, that’s a good bet to make.

The 12-inch MacBook isn’t even occupying an exclusive price point among Apple’s notebook lineup. You can get the current MacBook Air starting lower and ranging through that $1,300 zone and well beyond, with updated internals also debuted at Monday’s event. If the $1,299 MacBook were the only game in town for someone looking for a portable Apple OS X computer in that price range, and if it offered the port loadout it does in today’s computing and computer accessory environment, then some of these complaints might be valid – but it isn’t, and they’re not.In other words, that Core M processor isn’t hiding – Apple isn’t claiming this computer is a powerhouse media-editing tool. Instead, it’s a fast, light, everyday machine. It’s a gazelle, not a rhino. If you want a rhino, Apple has plenty of those, too – the new 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro with Force Touch is a prime example.

As someone who has actually touched, held and used the new MacBook, I can personally attest to the fact that this is a fully realized piece of equipment, and one that offers significant advantages in exchange for its perceived trade-offs. As with any purchase decision, prospective buyers will have to weigh the device’s particular strengths and weaknesses against their own usage habits; something which, again, hardly merits ire.

Apple’s main strength when it comes to product design is being able to intelligently adopt new technology both early and late, depending on when it thinks it will provide the most value to users. Some things like NFC come after they’ve been out and available for a while, but in time for mass adoption in specific settings, and other features like Touch ID and Thunderbolt leave competitors scrambling to catch up. The USB-C shift is like those latter examples, a push forward that is part-and-parcel of the reduction of ports that accompany its introduction.

Behold my beloved 12-inch G4 PowerBook: Witness the many ports it provides. The left side of the machine is like the cratered surface of the moon, and the right side is dominated by an optical disc drive (it also weighs more than twice as much as the new MacBook, and it has a fan: boy does it ever have a fan). And yet today most people couldn’t even name each of those ports, let alone find a worthwhile way to use them.

The ultimate test for the new MacBook, as with any product Apple brings to market, will be in how it satisfies the needs of its everyday users. A lot of people have theorized that the notebook might not be able to handle some tasks like photo editing that even more casual computer users would need, but a lot of that is conjecture based on artificial tests on the Core M that spit out numbers about how the processor behaves on paper in a vacuum. Intel’s Turbo Boost tech doesn’t necessarily play nicely with these kinds of benchmarking tools, and virtualized testing is never a good substitute for real-world use.

The all-new MacBook represents a paradigm shift in personal computing, but Apple isn’t dragging anyone kicking and screaming into the future. I suspect, however, that those who do accept the fast-forward invitation ultimately won’t be all that troubled by the trade-offs it represents.