In a press event held in San Francisco today, Apple showed off major updates to a few of its products. The iPad grows bigger with iPad Pro, Apple TV gets a new operating system and remote, and the iPhones look the same, but get some interesting innovations.

Bigger iPad Pro coming in November

When Time Cook said that he had “The biggest news in iPad since the iPad,” he wasn’t kidding. The iPad Pro is massive, big enough that it’s width can accommodate the height of the latest model, iPad Air 2.

The 12.9-inch (diagonal) Retina display is supported by a four-speaker audio system that balances the sound output depending on how you’ve got it oriented.

iPad Pro is built with an A9X processor, 1.8 times faster than the A8X it replaces. Apple’s Phil Schiller called it “desktop-class performance” and claimed that it’s faster than 80 percent of the laptops sold in the last year.

The larger screen means that the iPad Pro can display a full-size keyboard, and even a piano keyboard, are possible with the larger screen.

Apple claims a 10-hour battery life for the iPad Pro. And while the new tablet is only 8 mm thicker than the iPad Air 2, it weighs almost as much as the first iPad. Time will tell how difficult it will be to hold that up for an entire day.

Available in November, the iPad Pro will come in three configurations:

• 32 GB Wi-Fi (US$799)
• 128 GB Wi-Fi (US$949)
• 128 GB with Wi-Fi and cellular (US$1,079)

Also announced was the iPad mini 4, with the features of iPad Air 2 compressed into a smaller package.

Accessories make the iPad Pro even better

Two peripherals designed to work with the iPad Pro make it even more useful.

The iPad Pro keyboard case (US$169) borrows from Microsoft’s Surface tablet by including a keyboard case accessory. It uses magnetic connectors to keep the iPad Pro attached to the keyboard, but also to transmit power to the keyboard, and data to the iPad.

The Apple Pencil (US$99), which borrows from Samsung’s Note, is a stylus with sensors that send information to the iPad Pro. You can even use the Pencil and fingertips at the same time, with a virtual ruler, for example.

In the demo video, an illustrator’s hand was not impacting the drawing, but their fingertip was, which indicated how useful the Pencil could be.

New Apple TV the “future of television”?

Apple’s move into the living room takes another step with the new Apple TV. The company’s plan is to replicate what worked with smartphones, by providing the hardware, the operating system, and a solid user experience, and let others come up with the content and the software.

So Apple TV is getting its own operating system, tvOS, which has been opened up to software developers to create apps for the living room. They include games, home shopping apps, and sports apps.

The new device is voice-controlled with Siri, and comes with a new remote which has directional sensors and a touch surface area.

Voice commands for Siri are elegant, and there are built-in features that will immediately improve TV viewing, like being able to say, “What did she say?” during a program, which will skip back 15 seconds and turns on closed captioning.

The new remote connects to the Apple TV with Bluetooth, and it can control TV and tuner power, volume, and inputs.

There are two configurations of the device, which will be available in late October, each with different flash storage capacity:

• 32 GB (US$149)
• 64 GB (US$199)

New iPhones want you to press harder

The force feedback that is available on Apple’s new Macbook laptop has been built into the new iPhones.

3D Touch brings force feedback gestures to the iPhone. By pressing lighter or harder on the screen, you can have even more control over your smartphone.

Continue pressing, for example, to open apps or dive deeper into content.

You get touch feedback, too, which comes from a new “taptic” vibrator.

The other big iteration on the new iPhones is a better camera system that includes a 12 MP iSight camera in the devices that does not compromise on image quality, 4K video capability, and a new feature called Live Photos.

Live Photos takes a still picture and adds a few seconds of animation and sound. The experience is like the wizard pictures in Harry Potter coming to life.

What the iPhone does is grab still photos for 1.5 seconds before and after the image. And Live Photos is coming to all Apple devices with the next software updates.

Pricing for the new iPhones is the same as when the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus were released last year (which themselves become cheaper). Prices to purchase the smartphones outright (they are cheaper with a 24-month contract):

iPhone 6S

• 16 GB ($899)
• 64 GB ($1,029)
• 128 GB ($1,159)

iPhone 6S Plus

• 16 GB ($1,029)
• 64 GB ($1,159)
• 128 GB ($1,289)

The new iPhones come out on September 25.

Cross-posted at the Georgia Straight

This week, following up on the Ashley Madison fallout, and what Google’s new logo tells us about the company.

Ashley Madison update: More bots than we expected

So Avid Life Media, the company behind Ashley Madison, has refuted the analysis of Gizmodo journalist Annalee Newitz.

It seems that Newitz misinterpreted the data released by hacker group Impact Team. It turns out that there was no way for her to know how many of the 5.5 million accounts created for female users were actually created by real people.

A second release of information, more carefully analyzed by Newitz, tells a different story.

“What I have learned from examining the site’s the source code is that Ashley Madison’s army of fembots appears to have been a sophisticated, deliberate, and lucrative fraud,” writes Newitz. “The code tells the story of a company trying to weave the illusion that women on the site were plentiful and eager. Whatever the total number of real, active female Ashley Madison users is, the company was clearly on a desperate quest to design legions of fake women to interact with the men on the site.”

It seems that some 70,000 bots – automated conversation systems – were created to communicate with male users, encouraging them to spend money on services.

“Ashley Madison aspired to be a global network of people breaking the bonds of monogamy in the name of YOLO. Instead, it was mostly a collection straight men talking to extremely busy bots who bombarded them with messages asking for money,” Newitz writes.

It’s damn comical, is what it is.

And it’s looking ever more likely that the company, despite claiming the contrary, may have to shut down. Which, funny enough, is what the hackers wanted in the first place.

Google’s new logo drops links to the past

September 1 was a big day for Google. The company unveiled a new logo. An animated logo.

The new, moving logo is based on four coloured dots, which swirl into a multi-coloured “G”, splash into the company’s wordmark, and dance around playfully. If you’re using voice commands, the four dots stretch into lines that show you the system is listening to you.

The new font, Product Sans, was custom created for Google, and is also used for the wordmark of parent company, Alphabet. There’s a great article by Google designers Alex Cook, Jonathan Jarvis, and Jonathan Lee, explaining what went into the new logo.

What I like about this new logo is that it’s purpose built for screens. Static logos are a vestige of the print era. It’s only a matter of time before we all have giphy business cards.

This week, what to think about the Ashley Madison affair, the story of a visit to an Apple Retail Store, and a look at the two new smartphones from Samsung, the Note 5 and the S6 Edge Plus.

Ashley Madison hack

The home page for Ashley Madison still claims that it’s nearly 40 million members are anonymous. They might want to think about updating that.

If you don’t know, the site claims to be “the world’s leading married dating service for discreet encounters”. Its tagline: “Life is short. Have an affair.”

In July, a hacker group calling itself Impact Team assumed responsibility for hacking into the servers of Avid Media, the Toronto company that runs Ashley Madison. Impact Team allegedly stole data on users (some believe that the information was actually snagged from within the company by an employee) to force the site’s closure.

The big complaint by Impact Team was that Ashley Madison, which offered to delete user information from servers for the cost of $19, wasn’t actually deleting the information even after collecting the fee. That fact appears to have been validated.

Last week, information on the company’s users was “dumped” online, and in just a few days a number of online search engines have sprung up to allow anyone to search the database. Certainly there are names and email addresses in the data; less clear is whether financial information such as credit card numbers are tied to specific accounts.

But the impact is undeniable. While there have been ever growing breaches of privacy come to light in recent years, the one swirling around infidelity and sex is what has people all worked up. Enough, say Toronto Police Department, that they have related reports of extortion and suicide.

Avid Life has offered a Cdn$500,000 reward for information that “leads to the identification, arrest, and conviction of the person or persons responsible for the theft of proprietary data”.

And the lawsuits have started to pile up. A number of filings have been made in Canada and the U.S., all seeking to make this into a class action lawsuit.

There’s some great analysis of Ashley Madison’s data by Gizmodo’s Annalee Newitz, who discovered that of the 5.5 million women in the data leak (compare that to 31 million men) only 12,000 were likely real people. And of those 5.5 million female accounts, there was almost no activity from those accounts.

Newitz’s analysis indicates that Ashley Madison made money from males who were chasing a fantasy that was never going to be real. It’s a great business to be in, because what male is going to complain publicly that they weren’t getting what they expected?

Regardless, what the data leak is about, really, is privacy. And our personal commitment to respect privacy. Yes, those names and emails are out there, easily available, if you want to look.

But you don’t have to.

A satisfying, productive visit to an Apple Retail Store

My wife is a university professor, and we realized last week that the laptop she uses is nearly seven years old.

That’s an eternity in the world of computers. It was quite simply time to get a new laptop.

The last time she got a computer, I convinced her to get a Macbook. It’s what I’ve used for years, and I knew she’d appreciate the ease of use.

So we visited the Apple Store in Pacific Centre. We weren’t there to get me a computer, so I stayed in the background and wrangled our two kids (not too difficult in the Apple Store) while she spoke with an Apple staff member named Jamie.

They chatted for about 20 minutes. As I eavesdropped, I picked up that Jamie was asking my wife what she used her computer for, what she wanted to be able to do with a new computer, and what she thought she needed.

We had brought her old computer with us, and Jamie looked at that, too, to find out how much hard drive space she had used up and what programs were running on the machine.

And while I would have picked for my wife a Macbook Air 13”, she chose the Macbook Air 11”. She opted for the machine that was smaller and lighter, without compromising on keyboard or functionality, and with only a slightly smaller display. It was a decision she made on Jamie’s recommendation.

Later, Jamie mentioned that he often has to talk customers into buying less computer. People think they need all kinds of memory and storage, but after he finds out what they’ll be using their computer for, he moves them into something more appropriate to their needs.

My wife also opted to pay $99 for One to One. That gives her a full year of personal training on Apple products and services and also meant that the staff at Pacific Centre would transfer everything from the old laptop to the new one. That migration is completed within two days.

Because my wife is an educator, she got a discount on her new computer. And with Apple’s annual back to school promotion, she walked out with a pair of Beats Solo2 headphones.

I’ve never had a bad experience at an Apple Store. The staff are knowledgeable, friendly, and best of all, helpful.

New Samsung phones

Samsung’s two new smartphones have a great new video feature, and it’s being overshadowed by a design flaw

Samsung released two new mobile devices on Friday. The Samsung S6 Edge Plus and the Samsung Note 5 are both now available at your preferred wireless provider for something around $950 to $1050 without a plan.

One of the coolest new features that Samsung has introduced to these devices is that you can live broadcast video to anyone in your contact list. Live video leverages YouTube, so you and the people you invite to watch must have YouTube accounts, but the video is not streamed on YouTube.

You can invite up to 20 people to watch, and they can watch on any device that gives them access to YouTube. And your video is recorded to YouTube, so you can edit and share it later, too.

Unfortunately for Samsung, the easy video live streaming is going to be overlooked by the fact that the Note 5 can be easily broken.

The Note devices have always come with a stylus, called the S Pen, which can be used for writing on the screen. A new design on the Note 5 has the home for the stylus in the device itself, sort of how Nintendo has always housed the DS stylus inside the unit.

The trouble with the Note 5 is that the S Pen can be inserted into its housing just as easily regardless of which end goes first.

If you insert the writing tip first, you’ll be fine. But if you mistakenly insert the other end, you break the feature of the smartphone that senses when the stylus has been removed or inserted.

That feature was so that when you removed the stylus, the Note 5 would automatically turn the screen into a memo pad.

And if you push the stylus in too far, it becomes jammed.

It’s a serious design flaw and I’m amazed that this wasn’t detected long before the device went into manufacturing and distribution.

Samsung’s response thus far is to “read the manual” which clearly states that there is only one way to insert the stylus, and that inserting it the wrong way can “damage the pen and your phone”.

Most people are going to be fine. But it’s so easy to make this mistake if you’re not paying attention. Or if your kids get their hands on it.

And it would have been so easy to taper the stylus so it couldn’t go in the wrong way,

Needless to say, I’m not recommending the Note 5.

But if you’re looking for a high-end Android device, the latest version of the Samsung S6 Edge Plus is slick. It’s got the same guts as the Note 5, and comes in 32 GB and 64 GB configurations (the Note 5 is only available with 32 GB).

The S6 Edge Plus has a curved screen on both sides of the device, and you can enable the edge display on either side.

The 5.1-inch Super AMOLED display is delightful. And the functions and information available for the edge display have improved, too.

It has wireless charging built in, and you can pick up wireless chargers for only $59. You can charge to full in 120 minutes. If you plug into the fast charging battery pack ($79), you can charge your S6 Edge Plus to full in 90 minutes.

At $950 and $1050 for the 32 and 64 GB versions, the S6 Edge Plus is not a cheap smartphone. But it’s got the features you’ll expect from a premium Android device.

Cross-posted at the Georgia Straight

Sam Ferris is sitting in for Drex this week. We talked about the new Motorola smartphones, the Moto G and the Moto X Play. We also talked about how you can take university courses for free. And wrapped everything up with talk of the launch of Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, which was crafted here in Vancouver.

This week, a look at Motorola’s new line of smartphones, the Moto G and the Moto X Play. Plus, the new Gears of War is being made in Vancouver, and how you can learn computer programming for free.

Motorola aims for mid-tier mobile market with new Moto X Play, makes Moto G waterproof

On Friday, Motorola’s latest smartphone hits Bell, Koodo, and Telus. The Moto X Play will retail for about $400, depending on your carrier.

In an interview last week, director of sales for Motorola Mobility Carly Biggart said that the new line of smartphones, the Moto X Play and the third-generation Moto G, already available, were designed knowing that “people have intense relationships with their devices”.

“You love your phone,” said Biggart. “But does it love you back?”

One of the things I like about Motorola’s smartphones is that they come with the basic Android operating system. There aren’t a pile of apps you don’t want and you’ll never use bloating your device before you even turn it on.

Those apps that come on the Motorola devices are enhancements, like the ability to enable Google Now by voice command, instead of a tap on your phone. Motorola’s enabled all of the apps through the Google Play Store, too, so they update automatically.

The Moto G is a solid, everyday phone for people who need a basic smartphone. The device can withstand being under up to three feet of water for up to 30 minutes (but don’t attempt to use it underwater) which makes it perfect for a teen’s first mobile.

The Moto X Play is for when they’re ready to upgrade. It’s priced cheaper than the premium smartphones but is outfitted with a new chip, runs on the latest Android operating system (Lollipop 5.1.1.), and has a 21 megapixel camera.

It’s also equipped with a massive battery that can deliver up to 48 hours of life depending on how much you use your phone (and for what). Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and NFC are standard these days, and the 16 GB on board storage is expandable up to 128 GB with a SD card.

My favourite features of the new Moto X Play:

• You can turn it on by simply twisting your wrist
• A double twist of the wrist will enable the selfie camera
• There’s built in optical character recognition (OCR) software so you can take a picture of a business card and have the person automatically added to your contact list
• You can enable lock screen notifications so you can see if that text message that just came in during your meeting is your spouse informing you that your lottery numbers came up
• Location-based assists can be set up to take effect when you’re at specific places; to mute your smartphone when you’re at your local movie theatre, for example
• TurboPower charging will give you eight hours of battery in only 15 minutes. Koodo and Telus are including the TurboPower charger in the box with the Moto X Play; Bell and Wind will be selling them separately

Both the Moto G and the Moto X Play have a number of personalization options, including coloured back plates and flip coverings.

There is currently no plan to release the Moto X Style in Canada.

Cross-posted at the Georgia Straight

How to get schooled for free

Curious about computer science? If you want, you can take Harvard’s “Intro to computer science” course online, for free. It’s the full introductory course – CS50 – taken by students attending Harvard in real life (IRL), but using an online interface.

Harvard is far from being the only university to make its courses and course materials available for free. Others include UC Berkeley and MIT, and you can find hundreds of courses at edX, Open Culture, and the Open Learning Initiative.

And Apple has dozens of institutions on iTunes U including Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Yale, and the Open University.

As for CS50, you can take the course on the institution’s own HarvardX online service, on iTunes, or on YouTube. And for a small fee, you can be awarded a credit for taking the course if you do it thorugh the Harvard Extension School.

Yes, it’s a freemium university education.

Here’s instructor David Malan with the course outline.

Gears of War gets remade, not remastered, in Vancouver

The Coalition is a Microsoft Games Studio in Vancouver’s Crosstown area, and for the past seven months the developers there have been hard at work remaking one of the best games ever released on the Xbox 360.

Gears of War was first released in 2006 as a Microsoft exclusive. Developed by Epic Games in North Carolina, the franchise was acquired by Microsoft in January of this year, and Rod Fergusson, who helped make the first three games in the series, was hired to run the studio.

His first decision was to completely remake the 2006 game, and the result, Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, will be released on Tuesday, August 25, exclusively on Xbox One.

The cinematics were completely redone, including the motion capture, and much of the art was recreated. Remaking the game was not only a way to help the Vancouver developers learn how to make a Gears of War game, it will help settle the fans who are anxiously awaiting Gears of War 4, also being developed at the Coalition. But it’s at least a year out.

Read more about Gears of War: Ultimate Edition at the Georgia Straight

Here’s the trailer for the remade game. Don’t watch it unless you’re 18 or older.