Top 10 most expensive cars in the world 2015

Source: AutoMotoPortal.com


1.Bugatti Veyron $1,700,000

The Bugatti Veyron 16.4 is the most powerful, most expensive, and fastest street-legal production car in the world, with a proven top speed of over 400 km/h (407 km/h or 253 mph). It reached full production in September 2005. The car is built by Volkswagen AG subsidiary Bugatti Automobiles SAS and is sold under the legendary Bugatti marque. It is named after racing driver Pierre Veyron, who won the 24 hours of Le Mans in 1939 while racing for the original Bugatti firm. The Veyron features a W16 engine—16 cylinders in 4 banks of 4 cylinders.





According to Volkswagen, the final production Veyron engine produces between 1020 and 1040 metric hp (1006 to 1026 SAE net hp), so the car will be advertised as producing "1001 horsepower" in both the US and European markets. This easily makes it the most powerful production road-car engine in history.

2.Ferrari Enzo $1,000,000





The Enzo Ferrari, sometimes referred to as the the Ferrari Enzo and also F60 is a 12-cylinder Ferrari supercar named after the company's founder, Enzo Ferrari. It was built in 2003 using Formula One technology, such as a carbon-fiber body, F1-style sequential shift transmission, and carbon-ceramic brake discs. Also used are technologies not allowed in F1 such as active aerodynamics. After a maximum downforce of 1709 pounds (775 kg) is reached at 186 mph (301 km/h) the rear spoiler is actuated by computer to maintain that downforce.

3.Pagani Zonda C12 F $741,000






The Zonda C12 F debuted at the 2005 Geneva Motor Show. It is the most extensive reengineering of the Pagani car yet, though it shares much with its predecessors including the 7.3 L V12. Power is increased to 602 PS (443 kW/594 hp) with a special clubsport model producing 650 PS (478 kW/641 hp). The company promises a 3.2 second sprint to 60 mph (97 km/h, a top speed over 374 km/h (225 mph) and it will be the queen in braking from 300 km/h to 0 (186 mph to 0). The Zonda F clubsport has a power to weight ratio of 521 bhp/ton (384 W/kg) . Compare, for example, the Enzo Ferrari which has a power to weight ratio of 483 bhp/ton (356 W/kg).

4.Koenigsegg CCX $600,910




The Koenigsegg CCX is the latest supercar from Koenigsegg. CCX is an abbreviation for Competition Coupe X. The X commemorates the 10th anniversary of the completion and test drive of the first CC vehicle in 1996. The CCX is intended to be more suitable for the U.S. market and thus engineered to comply with US regulations. The CCX is powered by a Koenigsegg designed and assembled, all aluminium, 4700 cm³ DOHC 32-valve V8 based on the Ford Modular engine architecture enhanced with twin Rotrex centrifugal superchargers with response system, 1.2 bar boost pressure and an 8.2:1 compression ratio. The engine produces 806 hp (601 kW) and 678 lbf.ft (920 Nm) on 91 octane (U.S. rating) gasoline, 850 hp (634 kW) on 96 octane (Euro rating) gasoline and 900 hp (671 kW) on biofuel.

5.Porsche Carrera GT $484,000

The Porsche Carrera GT is a supercar, manufactured by Porsche of Germany. The Carrera GT is powered by an all-new 5.7 litre V10 engine producing 612 SAE horsepower (450 kW). Porsche claims it will accelerate from 0 to 100 km/h (62.5 mph) in 3.9 seconds and has a maximum speed of 330 km/h (206 mph), although road tests indicated that in actuality the car could accelerate from 0-60 in under 3.5 seconds and to 0-100 in 6.8 seconds and has a top speed of 335-340km/h (209-212.5mph).

6.Mercedes SLR McLaren $455,500




The Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren is a sports car and supercar automobile co-developed by DaimlerChrysler and McLaren Cars. It is assembled at the McLaren Technology Centre in Woking, England. Most people presume "SLR" to stand for "Sportlich, Leicht, Rennsport" (German for "Sport; Light; Racing"). The car's base price is £300,000 or $455,500. The SLR has a supercharged 5.5 (5439cc) litre dry sumped 90 degree V8. It produces 466.8 kW at 6500rpm (626 hp) and 780 N·m (575 ft·lbf) torque at 3250 - 5000 rpm.

7.Maybach 62 $385,250





The Maybach 57 and 62 were the first automobile models of the Maybach brand since the brand's revival by DaimlerChrysler. They are derived from the Mercedes-Benz Maybach concept car presented at the 1997 Tokyo Motorshow (which was based on the Mercedes-Benz S-Class sedan). DaimlerChrysler attempted to buy the Rolls-Royce/Bentley marque when Vickers offered the company up for sale. When this attempt failed (they were outbid by BMW and Volkswagen respectively) they introduced the Maybach as a direct challenger in 2002. Both models are variants of the same ultra-luxurious automobile. The model numbers reflect the respective lengths of the automobiles in decimetres; the 57 is more likely to be owner-driven while the longer 62 is designed with a chauffeur in mind. The engine is a Mercedes-sourced 5.5-liter twin-turbo V12, generating 550 hp.

8.Rolls-Royce Phantom $320,000





The Rolls-Royce Phantom is a luxury saloon automobile made by Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, a BMW subsidiary. It was launched in 2003 and is the first Rolls-Royce model made under the ownership of BMW. It has a 6.8 L, 48-valve, V12 engine that produces 453 hp (338 kW) and 531 ft·lbf (720 N·m) of torque. The engine is derived from BMW's existing V12 powerplant. It is 1.63 m (63 in) tall, 1.99 m (74.8 in) wide, 5.83 m (228 in) long, and weighs 2485 kg (5478 lb). The body of the car is built on an aluminium spaceframe and the Phantom can accelerate to 60 mph (100 km/h) in 5.7 s.

9.Lamborghini Murcielago $279,900


Click to enlarge



The Lamborghini Murciélago is a GT and supercar automobile made by Automobili Lamborghini S.p.A. and designed by Luc Donckerwolke. It was introduced in 2002 as the successor to the Diablo. The body style is a two door, two seat coupé. The LP640 version was introduced at the Geneva Motor Show in March of 2006. It features a 6.5 L engine, now producing 640 bhp, improving performance substantially. There were also a few minor external changes, primarily to the low air intakes.

10.Aston Martin Vanquish $255,000





The Aston Martin V12 Vanquish is a supercar manufactured by Aston Martin since 2001. It rose to fame after being featured as the official James Bond car in Die Another Day, the twentieth James Bond film. In the film, the Vanquish has the usual Bond film embellishments, including active camouflage which rendered the vehicle virtually invisible. The Vanquish is powered by a 5.9 L (5935 cc) 48-valve 60° V12 engine, which produces 343 kW (460 hp) and 542 N·m (400 ft·lbf) of torque. It is controlled by a fly-by-wire throttle and a 6 speed 'paddle shift' or semi-automatic transmission. A special V12 Vanquish S debuted at the 2004 Paris Auto Show with the power upped to 388 kW (520 hp) and 577 N·m (426 ft·lbf).

Source: AutoMotoPortal.com

DUBAI'S BIGGEST SHOPPING IS HERE -GITEX SHOPPER GUIDE. Here is what to buy.

Top 5 tech trends @ Gitex Shopper Dubai: Buy it, try it or just eye it?
Don’t get fooled into buying last year’s technology – here’s what’s trending in tech today

By Emirates 247


Connectivity is a key pillar of the digital age, and a digitally connected Dubai is looking forward to Gitex Shopper Spring edition, a 4-day IT and electronics extravaganza that starts tomorrow, April 1, and runs until April 4, 2015.

We live in a connected world and the devices we use are getting smarter, and more interconnected, by the day.

Little wonder then that retailers and consumers both expect connected devices to be a key theme this year at Gitex Shopper Spring, foremost among them being the ubiquitous smartphone and its new companion, the wearable remote, also known as smartwatch.

Privy to what the retailers will be offering, Hassan Mosafer, Exhibition Director of the Gitex Shopper Spring at organisers Dubai World Trade Centre (DWTC), lists for Emirates 24|7 the top 5 tech trends that will drive sales and footfall at the upcoming tech fest.



#1 Multi-device lifestyles: Mobile devices are becoming an indispensable part of everyday life both at home and at work, as our world becomes increasingly digitised and connected. It is now commonplace for people to not only own more than one device, but also to use more than one device simultaneously, such as browsing social media on a smartphone while watching TV.

Emirates 24|7 takeaway: Go for devices that can ‘talk’ to one another – a smartphone that can order your TV which can hook onto your router and download stuff that can be wirelessly printed on your printer… you get the drift, right?



#2 Wearable Tech: The wearable technology market is gaining traction with everything from fitness and health related products to smart watches and audio-wearable tech. These products are becoming increasingly complex, able to provide significant levels of information and contribute to quality of life – whether convenience, time management, enjoyment, or critical health monitoring.

Emirates 24|7 takeaway: The Apple Watch is just a few days away, but if waiting is not your thing, remember that there are a host of wearables already in the market. These include smartwatches, wristbands and VR headsets from the likes of Samsung, Sony, HTC and more.

#3 Mobile Commerce: The growth of mCommerce is changing the way consumers purchase goods and services, with the use of handheld devices such as smartphones and laptops leading to a surge in both markets.

Emirates 24|7 takeaway: Go for devices that are ready to offer payment gateways whenever these are made available in the UAE/region. Apple Pay and Samsung Pay, unfortunately, will not be immediately available in the region owing to regulatory issues, but that shouldn’t stop you from having devices that can offer the gateways once the green flag is waived.

#4 Social photography: With one out of every four people around the world now regularly accessing social media, social photography is driving demand for smartphones, tablets and digital cameras. While smartphones and tablets provide the fastest sharing option of moments, digital cameras offers the highest quality pictures which can now also be shared thanks to new technology such as inbuilt Wi-Fi.

Emirates 24|7 takeaway: What’s better than a great smartphone camera? A DSLR that can connect to your Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts to share your pièce de résistance.

#5 Interconnectivity: As homes get smarter, the tech industry continuously produces devices capable of “communicating” with each other, such as TVs, smartphones, computers and refrigerators which are revolutionising the way we live our lives.

Emirates 24|7 takeaway: Remember what we said earlier – go for devices that can ‘talk’ to one another.

Watch the NEW commercial for the new Mustang_GT (Coming soon in all GCC TV)

Reports Torque News

The First 2015 Ford Mustang Commercial (and the Car) Should Appeal to the Younger Crowd

Photo:Torque.com

The first commercial spot for the 2015 Ford Mustang has hit the internet and it is very clear that Ford Motor Company is looking to attract a much younger demographic with their redesigned pony car – with a ton of fast paced action showing the car in action and lots of younger drivers participating in activities of the younger generation like surfing and skateboarding.


While the Ford Mustang has a younger average buyer than, say, the Ford Taurus, it should come as no secret to learn that a great many Mustang buyers who were lured in by the retro look of the current generation are older drivers who were alive when the Mustang originally had the look that the 2005-2014 models looked to copy. While there are certainly plenty of younger drivers roaring down the road in their newer Mustang, there are even more drivers in their 40s and 50s rolling around in an S197 Mustang and as is the case with any performance car – Ford is looking to grab the attention of the younger audience.

The 2015 Ford Mustang GT that debuted last week has a overall shape that is relatively similar to the outgoing models (that are in dealerships now) but regardless of the similar styling cues – it is hard to look at the 2015 Mustang in the same retro light as we do the 2005-2014 models. This edgy new look is intended to appeal to a global audience but Ford also wants to grab the eye of the younger buyer. While older buyers eat up the retro look, some younger buyers might lean towards something a little more modern looking such as the Subaru BRZ but the curvy new fastback Mustang is likely to appeal to that crowd. There are still enough obvious Mustang cues to attract that old school crowd but with the controversial front end, the shorter profile and the simple fact that the 2015 Mustang is new and different – the S550 Mustang could be just what the Motor Company needs to pull in the younger buyer.


At the same time, this new commercial showing younger people doing “younger people things” is likely to reinforce the idea with older buyers that the 2015 Ford Mustang will make you feel young. Because of that, we are likely to see an influx of middle aged divorced women snatching up these new models but that is nothing new – whereas getting a bigger piece of the twenty-something pie could be a big deal for Ford and for the 2015 Mustang. Helping the new Mustang grow in approval with the younger crowd could be a more efficient engine lineup featuring the new 2.3L EcoBoost 4-cylinder and maybe even a diesel engine option down the road.

Putting aside the hidden messages in the first 2015 Ford Mustang commercial, this short clip offers the best look that we have seen thus far of the new S550 Mustang in action with plenty of different camera angles showing the 2015 GT in motion….although there are just as many clips of people as there are shots of the new Mustang. I had the pleasure of meeting the new Mustang in person at the Dearborn Michigan debut and seeing the car in action – even just in video – makes me like the redesigned look even more.

Watch the video below for GCC countries

The private investigator who spies using drones

(Credit: Thinkstock)
Aerial vehicles are the latest tool for private detectives – but for how long? Rose Eveleth reports.
Related

'I want to be made into compost'


Chris Wright is a problem solver. Her clients come to her with an issue, a question, a mystery, and she figures out the best way to find the answer – using whatever tools she can. “I use a combination of new technology and old technology, because I have to solve a problem. So I’ve used everything from geese and dogs to Roombas to drones to GPS.”

Wright is a private investigator – and owner of the Wright Group – based in Anaheim, California. She’s worked in the business for more than 40 years, and has seen the tools available to investigators change dramatically. Early on, stakeouts in vans were important. More recently new technology in the form of tiny cameras and social media has begun to play a role. And she’s embraced those changes. Today, when the problem calls for it, she uses drones to do her work.

She gives me a few examples. If two people are meeting in a public place, a drone can be a helpful way to discreetly watch them. “We stay at about 50-75 feet [15-23 metres] above so nothing can be heard.” Drones are also helpful for aerial surveillance of locations that are hard to access on foot. And if a school or church is worried someone might be stealing or vandalising property, drones or small off-road vehicles (“Roombas on steroids” as she calls them) can film the property.




Chris Wright relies on gamers to pilot her snooping drones (Credit: Thinkstock)



In one case, Wright was asked to figure out whether or not a soda salesperson was crossing county lines and cheating on his contract. California is one of many states in which salespeople have regional contracts – for instance, Bob sells Pepsi in Los Angeles County and Nancy sells Pepsi in Orange County. If Nancy arrives at her usual businesses to sell her Pepsi and finds the soda supply has already been topped up, there’s a good chance that someone (perhaps Bob) has crossed county lines and sold illegally.

Hi-tech toys

Wright was asked to figure out whether this was happening. To do so meant visiting every major soda wholesaler from San Luis Obispo to San Diego – about 300 miles (480km) of California coast – and checking whether any were selling soda from the wrong salesperson. When there was illegal soda on sale, she would use a drone to follow the soda delivery trucks back to their depots. In one case, the warehouse the truck led her back to was out in the desert and would have been impossible to approach by car or foot without being noticed. But the drone was able to spy on the trucks covertly. “We could see between the warehouse door and the truck loading.”

Wright gets her drones from high-end toy stores, for about $200 each. They’re an expensive investment: not only do you have to buy the device, you also have to pay one or two people to pilot and spot the thing. And if you lose one during a mission, you’re out a good chunk of your budget. But it can be worth it, because for the cases in which they’re useful, they can be very useful indeed.




(Credit: Thinkstock)



Wright doesn’t pilot the drones herself. “I try to hire gamers. I go to the colleges and high schools and I find out who the geeks are, and then I hire them.” She said that her pilots are more skilled than she would ever be – and they like the challenge. Some of them are working towards their own private investigator licences, and their hours piloting the little devices can count as hours towards their certification. (None of Wright’s gamer pilots were willing to talk for this article. “They’re introverts,” she told me. “Not shy, but introverts.”)

Understandably, the idea of using drones to spy on people isn’t something everybody is comfortable with. In a case in Seattle in 2013, a woman reported that someone was using a drone to spy on her. “This afternoon, a stranger set an aerial drone into flight over my yard and beside my house near Miller Playfield,” she told the Capitol Hill Seattle Blog. “I initially mistook its noisy buzzing for a weed-whacker on this warm spring day. After several minutes, I looked out my third-story window to see a drone hovering a few feet away.” Her husband asked the drone operator, who was standing nearby, to move along – but the operator claimed to be acting within his legal rights.

Tightening regulations

Whether that’s true isn’t always clear. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 35 states considered adding drone bills to the books last year, and 10 states actually did add new laws. In Iowa, for example, it’s now illegal for the state to use drones to enforce traffic laws. In North Carolina, no one can use a drone for surveillance of a person or private property. And Tennessee now specifies that it’s a misdemeanour to use drones for surveillance of people who are hunting or fishing.

Wright’s drone operations might soon become legally questionable too. Earlier this month, a California senator introduced a bill that would extend property rights into airspace, meaning that drones flying over private property would be considered trespassers. Just a few days before that, President Obama and the Federal Aviation Administration announced new drone regulations as well, requiring – among other things – that drones must be under 55lb (25kg) and that operators must keep the flying vehicles in sight at all times.




Many states in the US are already clamping down on the use of drones (Credit: Thinkstock)



Because the laws are murky, many private investigators steer clear of drones. “The use of drones for surveillance is highly restricted by law,” said Kelly Riddle, a private investigator in Texas. “There are air space regulations as well as privacy laws that can easily be violated. Obtaining video using a drone has thus far been something that we have been advised is illegal.” That’s because drones are often used to observe activities that can’t be seen via a direct line of sight at ground level. Going out of your way to spy on such activities is considered an invasion of privacy, says Riddle. A lot of Wright’s work sidesteps this privacy question, because it involves helping schools and churches monitor their own property.

In all likelihood, the use of drones will be restricted under a more comprehensive set of rules and regulations in the United States sooner than later. But in the meantime Wright will continue to use them when they can help with her work. But she also says that regardless of the legality, if someone thinks their privacy is being compromised, they’re going to do something about it. That can mean shooting down drones – another activity that may or may not be legal. “I think a lot of my colleagues have lost them and realised that it is a tool, and if you invade someone’s privacy, well, if they can hit it they will.”

www.bbc.com

Big Data: Coming Soon to Your Bra?

Big Data: Coming Soon to Your Bra?







There’s no way around it. Tech doesn’t really get fashion. Neither hoodies nor glassholes are runway-worthy. But just like every other industry, fashion brands are racing to use the hot new thing in big biz: big data.

Big data is technology that enables companies to crunch billions of data points at a time, from your shoe size to your Social Security number, and it’s been a buzzword in the industry for some years now. Apparel companies once used big data mainly for marketing, but now they’re hoping to give consumers more precise sizing — and, slightly more creepily or excitingly, depending on your perspective, help you plug into a universe of personal data on your health, fitness and weight. What’s next could be a natural convergence of connected devices as wearables, smart gyms and more meet high-tech fashion.

“As the fashion industry adopts big data, it will find interesting patterns that correlate between clothing and people’s lifestyle,” says Kenneth Cukier, the co-author of Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think.

There are signs that the tech-fashion segment is poised to boom.

Here’s how it’s going down.

Some savvy companies, like Bodymetrics and True Fit, use full-body scans and databases of millions of measurements to tell customers their “perfect size.” Others, like New York men’s T-shirt maker Threadmason, geek out on sizing by offering a constantly changing array of 24 different shirt sizes for different builds and torso heights. The company updates sizes based on data about its buyers. Another company, San Francisco’s True&Co., sells bras according to a system that takes into account breast shape as well as the traditional back and bust measurements. The company solicits feedback from customers to uncover new bust profiles.

Not that all applications of big data equal good applications of big data, of course. There are privacy concerns, naturally. And the typical buyers of goods from Threadmason or True&Co. live luxuriously, with plenty of income to spare. Threadmason, launched earlier this spring, has only a few thousand customers; True&Co., founded in 2012, has surveyed just over 500,000 women for its sizing model.

But there are signs that the tech-fashion segment is poised to boom. It’s whetted investors’ appetites, for starters: True&Co., Bodymetrics and True Fit have collectively secured more than $25 million in venture capital funding. When the $30 billion big data industry meets the trillion-dollar fashion industry, and when even Burberry and Nordstrom employ data scientists, a boom seems inevitable.


The information fashion brands are collecting could be valuable not just to designers, but also to doctors and public health officials.

Customization might tempt shoppers, but it comes with high costs. Custom manufacturing can get expensive. True&Co., for example, whose bras retail for $40 and up, had to create custom bra molds for its manufacturer in China in order to produce its current collection, which is designed for eight distinct bust shapes. As a result, engineering the ideal fit for those on the extreme ends of the size spectrum is still a challenge.


“It will take a while for the actual physical product to live up to the promise of the data,” admits Michelle Lam, CEO of True&Co.

But there’s another upshot to fashion’s new love for big data. Namely: Companies want to share your data with the wider information universe. For your own good.

Health and wellness industries have probably been among the most successful collectors of data, big and otherwise. And the information fashion brands are collecting could be valuable not just to designers, but also to doctors and public health officials, says Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, who wrote Big Data with Cukier. For instance, sizing data could be used to track the likely incidence of obesity-related illnesses, such as diabetes.


Doctors aren’t yet calling up designers for their info, but fitness companies are. Bodi.me, a London-based company that enables shoppers to find their proper size in 60 brands, has partnered with XBody, a Hungarian company that makes a futuristic workout suit. Wearers of XBody’s suit track their body measurements as they train; that data syncs to Bodi.me’s platform, which offers up sizing recommendations. (Remember when you thought Fitbits were creepy?)

The service, which will launch later this fall, is meant to be motivational: Users can see profiles of themselves with different measurements and virtually try on different fashion labels. And some trainers are sure to use the service to pump up their clients, says Lara Mazzoni, Bodi.me’s CEO.

The list goes on: Another company, OMsignal, has developed exercise shirts that capture data such as its wearer’s heart rate and depth of breath — similar to devices like Fitbit and Jawbone UP. In the future, says Stephane Marceau, the company’s CEO, the app could provide recommendations for specific exercises. And in return, the company uses the data to make better-fitting apparel.

Says Marceau: “It’s an infinite cycle.”

images from : www.ozy.com 

culled from : www.ozy.com

keypords

images from :http://www.ozy.com/


I grew up in a South Asian family where we protected everything with plastic covers —including our VCR remote control. So while it’s not surprising that I continue to shield my electronics like precious artifacts, for years I’ve left the keyboard of my MacBook Pro exposed to random smoothie spills, Goldfish crumbs and germy sneezes.

And I didn’t think much about it — until I picked up a $20 iSkinkeyboard cover to see what all the fuss was about. These thin, silicone keyboard covers are custom designed for Mac keyboards, which they slip over like gloves. (The market for PC keyboard covers is too fragmented, since there are hundreds of models.)

We’ve all heard horror stories of friends killing their laptops after a water bottle tips or a cat misses the litter box. After all, the heart of a laptop computer sits below the keys, according to Rishi Persaud, iSkin’s VP of business development and strategic planning.


Isn’t it worth $20 for an extra layer of protection that could save you upward of $2,000 to buy a new laptop?

“It gives you that time … that second to take the keyboard protector off with the liquid or with the dust or whatever you might have spilled, and allows you just to wash it off and put it right back on as if nothing happened,” Persaud says.

Sip and snack on with the iSkin keyboard cover.
SOURCE iSkin

Sure, you might be that lone neat freak who never eats while typing and never spills anything, but isn’t it worth $20 for a layer of protection that could save you upward of $2,000 to buy a new laptop … just in case?

What’s more, KB Covers come printed with video, design, photography and audio software applications’ shortcuts for extra functionality. From Photoshop to Final Cut Pro to World of Warcraft, these custom covers cater to a range of super-users. “In the case of video editing, you can speed up your efficiency probably a good 40 to 50 percent if you know your keyboard shortcuts,” said KB Covers President Bruce Franklin.

As for the iSkin ProTouch FX cover I’ve been using, I like the feel but am bothered that it sometimes seems to slow my typing. And my bigger objection is how keyboard covers compromise the computer’s intended form factor. Isn’t the MacBook, in all its naked, aluminum unibody glory, a thing of beauty in and of itself? Would you throw a Snuggie over the Venus de Milo?

It’s true that products should be designed to survive without protectant covers, but Francois Nguyen, creative director at Frog Design, says it can actually be “flattering” to industrial designers when customers place so much value on a design that they pay to protect it. “It’s that preservation of something that they regard as precious,” Nguyen says.

And then there’s the practical angle: In today’s world of eBay and Craigslist, people are constantly buying and reselling electronics — which means that protecting your assets can translate to more dough in your pocket.

Keyboard covers are clearly a niche product that may not suit everyone. But don’t say I didn’t tell you so the next time someone jostles your latte and your Mac gets mucked.

culled from :http://www.ozy.com/

Eight Top Watches from the 2015 SIHH

Listening to the crystal-clear tones of Audemars Piguet’s new Royal Oak Concept RD#1—completely audible from across the room—epitomizes the sort of transcendent moments that can occur at the annual Swiss watch shows. Even though the watch is not a commercial product, and has no future release date announced, to hear it is to know that a page has been turned in the development of the complication. And while the Concept RD#1 may have stolen the show, there were plenty of other significant releases at the 25th edition of Geneva’s Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie. Here, with all of their merits and maybe a few warts, is a selection of the most memorable new releases from the show.

CULLED from : http://robbreport.com/

VR FILMMAKING’S FUTURE IS BEAUTIFUL AND…TOTALLY UNCERTAIN 353

SASCHKA UNSELD IS lonely.

The director who once helped two parasols find love in The Blue Umbrellais in the vanguard of filmmakers exploring virtual reality. Frankly, he’d like some company.

“I think it was about a year ago that I saw a VR thing for the first time and fell in love with it,” he tells a small audience in a warehouse space in New York’s Meatpacking District. “But, to be honest, VR right now is also kind of the loneliest place ever. [It’s like if] you go to a cinema with 20 screens but there’s just one movie showing and you’ve seen it 20 times. And most of the cinema is also empty so you’re there alone. That is VR right now.”

That’s why he’s called these people together. They’re here for “A Closer Look at Virtual Reality,” a salon of sorts hosted by Milk Studios to bring techies and VR types together with creatives from other disciplines. Unseld hopes the event, held earlier this month, sparks more gatherings—and eventually more VR films.

There has been a lot of talk lately about VR filmmaking, and the possibilities are incredible. Animated films, documentaries, and live-action experiences could be revolutionized by 360-degree environments and a choose-your-own-adventure storytelling platform. The problem is, no one knows how to do it. Unseld has some ideas he’s exploring for Oculus’s Story Studio. Chris Milk, whose company VRSE is offering demos of its latest projects, has some really promising pieces in the works. One of them, made with Vice, puts you in the middle of the anti-police brutality protests that erupted in New York last year. Indie director Rose Troche is doing some interesting things to give viewers two sides of the same story.

But does anyone know what VR “movies” will look like? Eh, not so much.People line up to try out Framestore’s Game of Thrones virtual reality experience Ascend the Throne during a recent VR salon in New York.

“The stories I would like to make, I don’t even know what they are yet,” Troche says. “I think that we who are traditional filmmakers don’t really know how to write for VR yet.” Indeed. One of the trickiest things to figure out will be what, exactly, a “story” is. Questions like whether a VR tale needs three acts or where the fourth wall is in an immersive 360-degree space haven’t been answered yet. And, to Troche’s point, it’s not even clear if a VR story needs a script.

Take, for example, the night’s most popular VR experience: Framestore’s Game of Thrones experienceAscend the Wall, which quite simply allows you to ascend the Wall of Westeros. It’s an improvement of the experience’s previous incarnation, in which participants were put in an elevator of sorts to simulate the experience of ascending the 700-foot-tall wall. This version uses position tracking—people walking around the warehouse space felt they were walking along the Wall. You could even jump off—I did, and it was surreal. But it’s still not telling a story.

And that’s OK. Not every story needs a beginning, middle, and end. In his spare time, Unseld has been working with director Lily Baldwin on a VR project that will incorporate contemporary dance into the VR experience. They’re still dreaming it up, but it’ll likely be more of a scene that turns viewers into voyeurs and leaves them with a feeling rather than give them the resolution of a plot. “Choreography is sort of a relationship to lens, and I wanted to put that into a product that could basically make people feel more alive, so they can empathize in a visceral way with their protagonist,” says Baldwin, a former dancer. “So VR is kind of a creative wet dream.”

VR is kind of a creative wet dream.DIRECTOR LILY BALDWIN

Elsewhere other ideas are being bandied about. If this night has a buzzword, it’s “empathy”—as in, “how does empathy change with VR?” Film critic Roger Ebert once said“movies are the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts,” but a machine that can literally put you in the place of a sexual assault survivor—as Troche’s Perspective; Chapter 1: The Party does—is a worthy successor.

But even empathy is tricky. Everything that happens in VR obviously feels far more real than anything on a theater or TV screen, and if they’re not careful, directors could traumatize people. As the night at Milk Studios winds down, Ingrid Kopp, director of digital initiatives for the Tribeca Film Festival, tells me finding the boundaries of what is and isn’t OK to do to people in VR will be an important question filmmakers must consider.

“Even the word ‘empathy’ and the fact that it’s thrown around so much with VR, what are we actually saying?” she says. “I just think that none of those things have been interrogated and this is part of the community that needs to do that.”Filmmaker Lily Baldwin tries out a VR experience during the New York salon.

There are other things the VR community needs to do, Kopp says. For one, keep it diverse and “don’t have a panel with five white guys, don’t do all the things that have been done again and again.” Also, fail freely. “The only way you’re going to learn how to do this is by doing it and probably getting it wrong,” she says. “People always talk about the history of cinema and say, ‘Oh, the movie camera came out and then an actual feature film came 20 odd years later.’ Obviously things are different now, things are moving much faster, but it still does take a while to find an art form.”

That’ll happen another day. The party is coming to a close. The final guests are ascending the Wall, and more and more people in fashionable boots shuffle out into the slushy streets. It’s cold out and Winter Storm Thor is about to dump a blanket of snow on the city. It’s odd, actually, that this salon happened in New York. Nearly everyone else in the virtual reality space is at the Game Developer Conference in the much more temperate climate of San Francisco. Then I remember Unseld, who planned the night with folks who organize the Future of StoryTelling summits, had a specific reason for holding the event here. He wants to tap into the very specific talents New York has.

“New York has this nice thing of having such a massive theater/arts/classical/fine arts scene and then also the rising tech stuff,” he says. “In the Bay Area, there is so much tech. While it’s great and fantastic and I love the stuff we’re doing at Story Studio, I feel like here there is the chance of having these more independent, artistic voices do projects in VR that ultimately I would want to see.”

And hopefully it means he won’t feel lonely much longer.

culled from:www.weired.com

images from www.weired.com

NEPTUNE SUITE: A TASTE OF WHAT COMPUTING SHOULD BE IN 2025

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The full Neptune Suite contains a tablet with detachable keyboard, a Pocket screen, the Hub that 's worn on the wrist, earbuds, and a dongle for streaming. Neptune

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The entire group runs on a customized version of Android Lollipop.

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A shot of the Tab device Neptune

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A detail of the magnetically attached keyboard for the tablet. Neptune

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The non-interactive portions of the casings all sport a texture that echoes the Neptune logo. Neptune

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At the core of the Suite lies the idea of solving the continuity problems that come as a given in our current computing lives. NeptuneAdvertisement

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The Hub itself is meant to be highly glanceable but also relatively full featured for a wrist-worn device Neptune

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The core technology is something called Wigig, which allows content streaming from the Hub to the Tab and Pocket with noticeable latency.  Neptune

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The Hub is, however, fairly beefy as a result of all its internal hardware.Neptune

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The earbuds in the Suite can be linked and worn like a necklace, thus solving the problem of tangled cords

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The earbuds also serve double duty as a charging cable. Neptune







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The full Neptune Suite contains a tablet with detachable keyboard, a Pocket screen, the Hub that 's worn on the wrist, earbuds, and a dongle for streaming. Neptune


WHEN NEPTUNE LAUNCHED its grand idea for upending the smartphone ecosystem, many responses boiled down to: Huh?

Sure, the idea sounded downright radical: Instead of a smartphone streaming to devices like a smart watch, the Neptune Hub and Pocket were created with the opposite relationship in mind. There was Hub, a smartwatch powerful enough to run apps, take calls, and send messages. And there was Pocket, a relatively dumb screen that fit in your pocket, like a smartphone, but was little more than an input device. Many people didn’t get it. “Most of the negativity was from people that don’t see this as a first start,” says Simon Tian, Neptune’s 20-year-old founder. “They thought we were just going to stop at the pocket screen.”

It isn’t. Today, Neptune launches what it calls Suite, a group of devices to augment Hub. There’s the Tab, a tablet with an attachable keyboard. There’s also a dongle that will stream to your TV, and wireless earbuds you can wear around your neck, and which cleverly doubles as a charging cord. It’s all selling for the price originally announced for the Hub and Pocket: $899 at retail, or a couple hundred less if you pre-order via Neptune’s Indiegogo campaign.

Working with industrial design firm Pearl, Neptune already has done much of the industrial design and component planning required to start intensive tooling and testing. Moreover, Neptune has now revealed that the core technology making it all work is something called WiGig, a new wireless protocol that allows streaming from the Hub to the other devices at up to 7GB per second—which Neptune claims creates latency too small to notice.

Now, it’s just a matter of funding and proving that there’s a market for such a novel experiment in computing.



Swinging Big

Tian isn’t shy about what Neptune is supposed to become. As he writes on the Indiegogo page:


This is only the beginning of a whole new computing era. Imagine a world where devices are so commoditized that they’re just part of the environment. They can be everywhere; in your home, at the office, in your car, in restaurants, shopping malls, schools… Need a screen? Simply find one and use it as yours.

Devices are also a lot more easier to design and produce, enabling product designers and manufacturers to potentially create an infinite variety of devices. Screens can be embedded into household appliances, cars, walls, and much more. Everything will become smart, by simply becoming accessories for your wrist.

This vision has precedent in computer science. In the early 1990s, Mark Weiser argued computers would become ubiquitous tools found everywhere in our environment. They would mold themselves to the needs and preferences of whomever was using them at the time. This thinking preceded Minority Report andHer by many years: You’d walk into a room, the computers in it would know who you are, and you’d be able to resume whatever stream of work or play you’d been involved with.

Suite is probably the first time that someone has been far-sighted enough—or crazy enough—to make that impersonal computing ideal a reality. Indeed, perhaps the biggest UX insight behind Neptune’s idea is this: the continuity problems that bedevil our digital lives simply go away if a single, wearable computer becomes a central computing node. No more synching between tablet and phone. No more weird transitions as you try to recreate Internet searches or migrate photos or profiles from one device to another. Moreover, the entire ecosystem gets cheaper when all your screens aren’t simply duplicating each other’s computing power.

The technology seems ready, or least very close to being so. It makes you wonder whether Apple, Samsung and the like might start tinkering as well, or if Neptune has enough of a head start to launch a relatively tiny, but nonetheless radical, product right under their noses.

culled from:www.weired.com

images from www.weired.com

STALK YOURSELF AT HOME WITH THIS FREE APP

WHAT GOES ON in your house when you’re not around?
A startup called Camio offers a free service that turns any old Android or iOS smartphone or tablet into a web-connected surveillance camera. Just install the app, sign up for an account and you’re ready to go.

Camio co-founder Carter Maslan, a former Google Maps project manager, says people use it for everything from home security to finding out what their pets do all day while no one is home. But the company ran into a problem soon after launching last year. Even though it only captures video that includes motion — so that you’re not storing hours and hours of video where nothing happens — it was still more than most people actually needed. “For most users, only about 51 seconds per day matter,” Maslan says.

Camio saves 30 days worth of video in the cloud, which you can watch from anywhere. You only have to pay if you want to connect more than one camera to your account.

So last week, the company launched a new feature called Camio Daily, an email digest of the stills that the company’s algorithms predict you’ll find most interesting, based on which clips you’ve watched before. Click a still, and you can watch the the video clip it came from.

It’s certainly a different take on the Internet of Things. Instead attaching sensors and Wi-Fi card to everything we want to know about or keep track of, the company repurposes something many of us just having lying around — old phones — and turns them into a way to learn more about what’s happening in a particular place. You can search your video archives using natural language — for example, “people approaching my walkway” — or set up alerts when certain things happen, such as when it captures an image of someone inside your house.
From Street View to Home View

The idea stemmed from Maslan’s time working on Google Maps Street View. “During literally every usability study at least one person would ask ‘Why isn’t my car there? I parked it there this morning,'” he explains. That led to the realization that there was a demand for live monitoring. There were plenty of other video streaming products out there—such as Dropcam, which was acquired by Google’s smart home company Nest last year—but they tended to capture far too much video to be useful. Plus, since they tended to stream everything they captured, they’d use a lot of banddwidth, which could slow down other video streaming services like YouTube or Netflix.

Camio’s innovation is that the camera app is selective about what it uploads. Maslan says that it’s algorithms are smart enough to tell the difference between, say, lighting changes or a blowing tree branch, and someone walking up to your porch. By reducing the total amount of data uploaded and stored, Camio can use much less bandwidth than a traditional webcam, and the company can afford to offer a free version of the service.

For most users, only about 51 seconds per day matter.CARTER MASLAN

Once the footage is moved to the cloud, Camio’s computers analyze the videos to try to automatically detect things such as which ones have people and what colors are present, so that users can search the archives.

It’s hard not to worry about uploading video footage from your house to the cloud, but Maslan says that all the video is encrypted so that not even Camio’s engineers can access it (though it’s not possible to verify this without auditing Camio’s servers). For people uploading video that’s not particularly sensitive –such as publicly viewable areas such as their front yards — this might not be a big deal. Everyone else will need to take a leap of faith.

It’s not hard to imagine Camio being used for corporate security or other applications, but Maslan says that the company is completely focused on the home market, at least for now. But Camio did just announce a new API that will allow select partners to build new integrations, and it’s possible that project could lead to some corporate or government uses.

“I came from Google Maps where we decided to focus on making a super simple product for consumers, but then open it up so that people could tie it into,” he says.

Or just spend all day watching yourself.

WHY DOES THE APPLE WATCH EXIST? WHO KNOWS

YESTERDAY’S EVENT PROVIDED a few key details about the Apple Watch. We learned how much it will cost, and when we’ll be able to buy it. But there’s still a very big hole in the center of the Apple Watch picture. Tim Cook and associates showed off a grab bag of features, but they once again failed to give any overarching sense of why this thing exists. What is the Apple Watch? How will we use it? Where does it fit in our lives? In what ways does it replace our phones? In what ways does it complement them?

It may be the case that Apple doesn’t need to answer these questions for the watch to be successful. But it’s starting to seem like Apple might not have answers for them at all, and that’s troubling.
Clearing a High Bar

It’s instructive to look back at the last time Apple jumped into a new product category. When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad in January 2010, he began by explicitly positioning it in relation to the devices we already owned. “All of us use laptops and smartphones now,” he said. “Is there room for a third category of device in the middle? The bar is pretty high. In order to really create a new category of devices, those devices are going to have to be far better at doing some key tasks.” He offered a few examples: Browsing, email, photos, video, music, games, ebooks. “If there’s gonna be a third category of device, it’s gonna have to be better at these kinds of tasks than a laptop or a smartphone. Otherwise it has no reason for being.”

That’s the missing piece. What is the Apple Watch’s reason for being? What are the things it’s better at than a smartphone?

Yesterday, Apple reiterated the three tent pole Apple Watch use cases it first mentioned last fall. Timekeeping. Fitness. Communication. The first is a gimme (though Mickey Mouse is seemingly doing all he can to muck that one up.) Fitness is important, certainly, but it’s hard to say the watch is revolutionary on that front. Apple had hoped to use advanced sensors to track things like stress, but they turned out to be too finicky, which leaves a fairly basic activity tracker, much of whose functionality is already possible with the iPhone. (Also: If you want to get us all on a health kick, why not just put those pretty circular activity graphics on iPhone lock screens?)

That leaves communication, to my mind the least convincing of the major use cases. During the event, we saw Apple Watch software lead Kevin Lynch scrawl an unfortunate looking flower to his wife and listened to him conduct a wrist-borne call with his dog groomer. We also saw him spend a good ten seconds poking through a WeChat menu to send a stamp that had no apparent bearing on his friend’s initial question. Tim Cook provided the obligatory mention of the unprecedentedly intimate act of sending someone your heartbeat.


Let’s be clear: The Apple Watch will introduce a few novel ways to communicate with friends and family. Some of them might be quicker than on the iPhone. But in no universe is the Apple Watch better for communicating than an iPhone. Sending a canned text message response might be useful when you have your hands full, but it’s different from writing a message yourself. Sending someone an animation of your heart beat may be intimate, but it’s not as intimate as talking to them on FaceTime.
What’s Its Relationship to Our Phone?

This gets to the heart of the problem with Apple Watch, or at least with how Apple’s talked about it. Apple hasn’t defined the watch in relation to the phone. We already carry our smartphones around all day; the fact that the watch piggy backs off the iPhone’s radio is an admission of this fact. Now, Apple’s trying to put a second device on our body without giving us a clear sense of how it complements the first.

When you want to send a text, which device do you turn to? Was the Apple Watch built as your go-to messaging device, or a sometimes good-enough one? Just like we mark emails as read on our phone and get back to them at our computer, will we read texts on our watch and reply to them later on our phones, when we have the fully emoji keyboard at our disposal? What’s the hierarchy of these devices? How do they fit together? If you have your watch-wearing hand in your pocket with your phone, and they both buzz, do you still pull your phone out? There’s little sense of how this juggling act will play out.
Another Distraction Machine?

Certainly, there will be plenty of times when it makes sense to read a message on your watch. Glancing at your wrist will often be faster than fishing your phone out of your pocket. Indeed, people who have used the Apple Watch told TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarinothat they were checking their smartphones significantly less because of it.

And this alone could be a killer app! At a point where many of us are becoming concerned about our obsessive relationship with our phones, the watch was a chance for Apple to plainly say, “hey, here’s a device that will let you spend less time looking blearily at a screen and more time looking at trees or books or the people sitting across the dinner table from you.”

But Apple hasn’t said anything to that effect. Maybe because it would be weird for Apple to be reminding us that its flagship product is keeping us from looking at trees and books and the people sitting across from us in the first place. Or maybe because Apple just doesn’t see our ever-escalating screen-gazing as a problem.

No moment during yesterday’s event better exemplified Apple’s ambivalence on this topic than when Tim Cook enthusiastically showed off Instagram for the Apple Watch. This was madness. It was very nearly parody. What comes after browsing your friends’ photographs on a 6″ display? Spinning a tiny wheel to scroll through your friends’ photographs rendered at postage stamp scale on your wrist.

The demo was dumb, but not just that. It suggested a certain obliviousness on Apple’s part about the ways this thing could go very wrong. The nightmare scenario for the watch (for us, not for Apple) is that it simply becomes another distraction machine, an even more irresistible place for dipping into the content streams that already flood our lives. We have no indication of Apple’s outlook on this possibility. Here’s a genuine question: If in six months we’re all constantly fiddling with our Apple Watches, would that make the product a success or a failure in Apple’s eyes?
A Jumble of Experiences

When Jobs explained the iPad in the context of phones and laptops, he wasn’t just explaining where the new device fit in Apple’s product line-up. He was explaining where it fit in our lives. He even plopped down in a cushy Le Corbusier chair on stage to show us the iPad at its finest. “It is the best browsing experience you’ve ever had,” he said, pulling up the website of The New York Times. “Way better than a laptop. Way better than a smartphone.”

Even Apple’s hand-picked audience would’ve guffawed if Tim Cook had claimed that the Apple Watch offered the best experience for browsing Instagram. But then, Apple hasn’t really suggested that the watch is about providing “best experience” for any one thing at all. Maybe someday it will emerge as the best experience for staying healthy or the best experience for authenticating identity online. For now, all we know is that the Apple Watch will bring a bunch of newexperiences. They will be served up in addition to the myriad experiences we’re already familiar with from our phones. Figuring out how to make sense of them all is apparently up to us.

reported from : www.weired.com

images from:www.weired.com

LIFE WITH THE MACBOOK’S SINGLE PORT WON’T BE EASY—YET

Apple is betting that a single USB-C port will be enough for most casual users-exactly who the new MacBook is geared toward.

APPLE HAS A history of “addition by subtraction” when it comes to ports and drives. It has over the years ditched FireWire, Ethernet, and optical drives. Now, with the MacBook, it says goodbye to all but a lonepioneering port. This probably was inevitable. So just how big of an adjustment are you in for?

Bigger than you might realize. At least for now.

How we push data to and from our machines constantly evolves thanks to the steady progress of new standards, faster wireless connectivity, streaming services, and the cloud. Apple tends to anticipate these changes—and in some cases force the issue, often being among the first to banish old-guard tech from its devices. It’s been a successful strategy; just ask any phone with a physical keyboard.

But the new ultraportable MacBook doesn’t just nip an optical drive here and a FireWire port there. It cleans house. And while we’re accustomed to hermetically sealed, port-barren devices in our pockets and on our coffee tables, a laptop with plenty of connectivity options is part of what makes minimalism possible elsewhere. With the new MacBook, your “plug and play” options are a 3.5mm headphone port and a USB-C port—a standard that isn’t exactly swimming in compatible components just yet.

The good news is that USB-C is versatile. It’s a standard that, unlike the stalled Thunderbolt interface, will be embraced by many devices and peripherals that don’t originate in Cupertino. It’s capable, too; the port on the new MacBook can shuttle data at 5Gbps, it can charge and be charged by whatever it’s hooked up to, it supports video out, and it’s tiny. The only bad news about the shift to USB-C ports is the MacBook has one of them.
Dangling Dongles

Of course, there are ways to compensate, though not as many as you might think. The cheapest, most direct way to get your USB devices to play nice with a USB-C port is a $19 USB-to-USB-C adapter from Apple (or this $13 model from Google, whose Chromebook Pixelfeatures two USB-C ports). That’s a good start, but it still limits your choices to hooking up a single device or charging your laptop.USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter.

For those who need more I/O in their lives, Apple now sells its own USB-C adapters that let you turn that single port into a three-headed hydra supporting HDMI-out, full-size USB 3.1, and a passthrough for power. Another version swaps the HDMI-out port forVGA-out. They cost $79. Each. That’s more than an Apple TV.

And even those pricey dongles don’t come close to replicating the ports on a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. The 13-inch Air has a dedicated power connector, a Thunderbolt 2 port, an SDXC card slot, two USB 3.0 ports, and a headphone jack. The 13-inch MacBook Pro has all of that, plus an additional Thunderbolt 2 port and HDMI-out.

Apple’s message is clear: You don’t need all those cables. It’s better to carry something that feels almost weightless, something elegant and slim and gold than have some pört-gåsbord weighing you down. “Besides,” Apple seems to insist, “you can address all of your needs via Web services, or streaming, or iCloud, or one of the wonderful new features we’ve added to Yosemite. Would you like more ports? Well, we have inelegant dongles and more-expensive computers for that.”

At some point, getting data and electricity to and from your MacBook with just one port may be seamless and natural. Today, though, we’re at least a few dongles away. Here’s how the MacBook plays out in practice.
Photos and Video

If you use an iPhone for most photos and directly upload your shots to your iCloud photo library (or the cloud service of your choice), you’re set. But if you use one of those old-school “standalone” cameras and one of those dinosaur “SD” or “CompactFlash” cards, you’ll need to wait until somebody makes a card-to-USB-C adapter to get much use out of the MacBook. In the meantime, you could plug a USB card reader into a $13 or $19 or $79 adapter.

Potentially easing the frustration is the fact that most modern cameras have built-in Wi-Fi features, so you can hypothetically leave your card in your camera, beam photos to your phone or a cloud service, and use it as a passthrough to your computer’s hard drive. That sort of set-up would be basically unworkable for pro photographers shuttling RAW files, though, and probably more trouble than it’s worth even when dealing with JPEG files in any quantity.


The same solutions and limitations apply to video editors. Videos taken with an iPhone can be magically ported to the machine via iCloud, Dropbox, or most other cloud services of your choice, so that’s easy enough. USB-C can handle video files zipping back and forth (through an adapter or new cable, for now). Other wireless transfer options aren’t very practical for files of the sizes you’ll be dealing with. The most likely setup for a wired-in connection will be a USB 3.0 or 3.1 cable running from a video-capture device through a dongle.
Storage

Your USB-C external hard drive options are non-existent right now, but help is on the way. This summer, SanDisk will offer a 32GB thumbdrive with USB-C and full-size USB connectors. A LaCie external drive will offer up to 2TB of portable USB-C-connected storage when it’s out later this year. End of list so far. But now that there’s a demand, the USB-C drive market will grow. You’ll have plenty of options if you hold out a few months.

Meanwhile, the new MacBook will come with up to 512GB onboard, and cloud-storage services abound these days. That could be enough for most people, but anyone who’s been stashing years of valuable files and photos and music on an external drive would be inconvenienced by a MacBook today. To get the important stuff from there to your new machine, for the time being you’ll need an adapter.
Ethernet

While Apple already phased out Ethernet ports across its laptop lineup, there are a few cases in which having one generally comes in handy. If you’re dealing with crappy Wi-Fi service or that odd hotel that only offers jacked-in connectivity, yes, you’ll need a adapter for that. Belkin already has announced a USB-C-to-Gigabit-Ethernet adapter, but the pricing and release date are still a mystery.
External Monitors and Video Output

Anyone who uses a laptop as a mobile machine and the docked guts of their home/office scenario will absolutely need to fork over for a dongle or avoid the new MacBook altogether. For now, at least.

Multi-port docks for the MacBook are likely on the way, but without that $79 add-on you won’t be able to simultaneously charge your laptop and work on a bigger screen or use a dual-monitor display. Or use a non-Bluetooth keyboard or mouse when your single port is occupied.

What may be the strangest USB-C fallout? If you want to mirror your laptop screen on your television, your cheapest and best option at this point is to buy an Apple TV. It costs $69 and supports AirPlay mirroring, while Apple’s HDMI-out multi-dongle will cost you $10 more.
iOS Devices

Curiously—and this is bound to change soon—there doesn’t seem to be a way to charge your iPhone or Pad with the new MacBook without using an adapter. Apple hasn’t yet officially announced a Lightning-to-USB-C cable. For all we know, one may come in the MacBook box. Otherwise, for a wired connection, you’d have to use a dongle, plug the fat end of your Lightning cable into that, and charge or sync an iOS device with a cumbersome setup.

There’s a reason, though, that Apple has put concerted effort in making Yosemite interact with iOS devices in wireless ways: Continuity, Handoff, and AirDrop are all geared toward seamless interoperability between its mobile and desktop OS, no literal strings attached. And here’s the big thing on the horizon: Future iOS devices will likely use USB-C as their one and only port, which will be an instant fix. Until then, you’ll need an adapter or an as-yet-unannounced cable to charge your iDevice from a MacBook.

Here’s a fun resulting fact. As of right now, it will be easier to charge an Android device with an Apple computer than to charge an iPhone or iPad with one—just as long as you have this upcoming $20 Belkin cable. Again, USB-C is a standard, and it’s one that will show up on many other devices, too, so don’t expect this to be an issue for long.

In many ways, this new MacBook is an exciting harbinger of a bright future, one teeming with interoperability and free of proprietary connectors. We’re not quite there yet, though. And until we are, it’s going to be a long, dongle-paved road.


culled from www.weired.com