First off, a few of you have been asking us if it’s cool to go ahead and upgrade to iOS 8 at this point. The answer is yes.
It certainly has a few issues here and there, but nothing major. Have fun. We very strongly recommend that you ensure you have an iCloud or iTunes backup first.
Apple Announcements
Next: Hot on the heels of their iWatch and iPhone 6 announcements, Apple held another event on Thursday to announce more of their latest and greatest. Here’s what’s new:
OS X 10.10 “Yosemite” — The latest version of the Mac operating system is available for free download from the Mac App Store today. As always, we advise that you hold off for a couple of weeks to see if any major problems emerge. There’s a lot of new features and the appearance has changed as well, with a system-wide font change to match the iPhone and iPad, and new icons. We’ll tell you all about it soon.
iMac with Retina Display — The ultrasharp “Retina” display that has graced the screen of the higher-end iPhones, iPads, and MacBook Pro finally comes to the Mac. Looks pretty awesome. The 27″ model starts at $2,499.
iPad Air — The confusingly named (because it’s the larger design) iPad Air 2 is even thinner and more powerful than its previous incarnation, features a better camera, and has the Touch ID fingerprint recognition feature introduced with the iPhone 5s. As before, it starts at $499 for the 16 GB model, and the 64 GB and 128 GB models are $100 cheaper than before. It’s also finally available in gold/white.
iPad Mini — The iPad Mini 3 was also introduced — it’s a lot like the iPad Mini with Retina display, but it now has Touch ID and is available in gold/white. Just to confuse everybody, Apple is continuing to sell the older models at lower prices.
Mac Mini — Apple’s adorable compact desktop computer/server gets a long-overdue and mostly unremarkable upgrade — it’s more powerful, has better Wi-Fi, and has an additional Thunderbolt port (at the expense of its FireWire port). Gone, however, is the dual-drive server model, or any quad-core CPU options.
Got any questions about Apple’s new toys? You know whom to ask.
(October 2014)