Apple iPad Pro is a little like the Mac Pro

Well, I tried. I tried the whole “use the iPad Pro instead of my computer for a week” thing and barely lasted a day. It doesn’t fit my workflow like my MacBook Air does, so I stopped trying to force it—and that’s OK. Apple’s newest largest tablet doesn’t need to be a laptop replacement to be good, but for a $300 premium over the cheapest iPad Air 2, it does need to deliver more than just a larger screen.

In some ways it does. Thanks to a faster processor and more RAM, the iPad Pro can enable a new class of applications that feel as powerful as desktop apps. Support for the Apple Pencil is limited to this iPad, so if your work includes drawing or drafting, or you’d rather handwrite notes than type them, your choice is clear: Buy this iPad Pro or wait a year to see if Pencil support trickles down to more models.

But if you aren’t planning to use the Pencil, it could be hard for most people to justify the extra cost over an iPad Air 2 or even an iPad mini 4—at least, it is for me. As a work tool, the iPad Pro is a little like the Mac Pro, or the MacBook Pro, or even something specialized like a miter saw: If you really need it to do your job, you likely know you need it, and you don’t need me to tell you. If you find yourself wondering if you really need it…you probably don’t.

The Pencil is the iPad Pro’s big selling point

Using the Pencil is awesome. It feels natural, and it writes naturally, and makes a cheap rubber-tipped capacative styluses feel like trying to write your name with a hot dog. Drawing and even just doodling with it are wonderful experiences thanks to the pressure sensitivity and tilt detection that help it act more or less as you would expect, with very little lag. I haven’t done much drawing or painting since college, but the Pencil just makes me want to use it, and the fact that I can doodle, or color, or sketch, or mind-map while catching up on a show in Hulu in a Picture-in-Picture window appeals to me in a unique way. It’s a strange blend of nostalgia for the time when paper and pencils were my daily tools of choice, and that futuristic tingle of using something that feels so cutting edge.

Apple Anounced Jeff Williams has been named chief operating officer

Apple® today announced that Jeff Williams has been named chief operating officer and Johny Srouji is joining Apple’s executive team as senior vice president for Hardware Technologies. Phil Schiller, senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, will expand his role to include leadership of the revolutionary App Store® across all Apple platforms. Apple also announced that Tor Myhren will join Apple in the first calendar quarter of 2016 as vice president of Marketing Communications, reporting to CEO Tim Cook.

“We are fortunate to have incredible depth and breadth of talent across Apple’s executive team. As we come to the end of the year, we’re recognizing the contributions already being made by two key executives,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “Jeff is hands-down the best operations executive I’ve ever worked with, and Johny’s team delivers world-class silicon designs which enable new innovations in our products year after year.”

Cook continued, “In addition, Phil is taking on new responsibilities for advancing our ecosystem, led by the App Store, which has grown from a single, groundbreaking iOS store into four powerful platforms and an increasingly important part of our business. And I’m incredibly happy to welcome Tor Myhren, who will bring his creative talents to our advertising and marcom functions.”

Jeff joined Apple in 1998 as head of worldwide procurement and in 2004 he was named vice president of Operations. Since 2010 he has overseen Apple’s entire supply chain, service and support, and the social responsibility initiatives which protect more than one million workers worldwide. Jeff played a key role in Apple’s entry into the mobile phone market with the launch of iPhone®, and he continues to supervise development of Apple’s first wearable product, Apple Watch®.

In nearly eight years at Apple as vice president of Hardware Technologies, Johny Srouji has built one of the world’s strongest and most innovative teams of silicon and technology engineers, overseeing breakthrough custom silicon and hardware technologies including batteries, application processors, storage controllers, sensors silicon, display silicon and other chipsets across Apple’s entire product line. Educated at Technion, Israel’s Institute of Technology, Johny joined Apple in 2008 to lead development of the A4, the first Apple-designed system on a chip.

With added responsibility for the App Store, Phil Schiller will focus on strategies to extend the ecosystem Apple customers have come to love when using their iPhone, iPad®, Mac®, Apple Watch and Apple TV®. Phil now leads nearly all developer-related functions at Apple, in addition to his other marketing responsibilities including Worldwide Product Marketing, international marketing, education and business marketing. More than 11 million developers around the world create apps for Apple’s four software platforms — iOS, OS X®, watchOS™ and tvOS™ — as well as compatible hardware and other accessories, and customers have downloaded more than 100 billion apps across those platforms.

Tor Myhren joins Apple from Grey Group, where he has served as chief creative officer and president of Grey New York. Under his leadership, Grey was named Adweek’s Global Agency of the Year for both 2013 and 2015. As vice president of Marketing Communications at Apple, Tor will be responsible for Apple’s advertising efforts and will lead an award-winning team that spans a broad range of creative disciplines from video, motion graphics and interactive web design to packaging and retail store displays.

Tor will succeed Hiroki Asai, who earlier announced plans to retire after 18 years in graphic design and marketing communications roles at Apple.

Apple revolutionized personal technology with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. Today, Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Apple’s four software platforms — iOS, OS X, watchOS and tvOS — provide seamless experiences across all Apple devices and empower people with breakthrough services including the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay and iCloud. Apple’s 100,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth, and to leaving the world better than we found it.

New Way Hack iCloud

A new tool submitted to GitHub claims to be able to perform password dictionary attacks on any iCloud account, seemingly able to evade detection from Apple’s rate-limiting security that is supposed to prevent such dictionary attacks from happening. In September, Apple reported it had closed one such hole that allowed brute-force attacks to occur. The sourcecode for the tool has been released onto GitHub. Upon inspection, the tool is really rather crude in its complexity. It simply tries every possible word in its 500-long word-list as the password for a given iCloud account email. This means whilst it will succeed “100%” at trying 500 times over, the tool is by no means guaranteed to succeed at cracking your password. 

Any password that is not simply a word from the dictionary listed on this page is safe from this ‘hack’. Still, brute-force vulnerabilities are very important as many users do use plain dictionary words as their passwords. More determined hackers could also use the exploit to brute-force much more complex passwords, so the threat is very real. For instance, hackers with more resources could use a dramatically larger word list than the one posted on GitHub. Apple should be able to patch the hole soon, however. It is not a complicated hack — it appears to rely on pretending to be an iPhone device. For whatever reason, Apple’s servers allow these type of requests infinitely without locking password attempts after several requests.

Hacker Realeased New Way to Brute Force Icloud

The problem came to light after a proof-of-concept attack tool called iDict was released on GitHub in early January.

Developed by a user who uses the online alias Pr0x13, the tool was described as “100% Working iCloud Apple ID Dictionary attack that bypasses Account Lockout restrictions and Secondary Authentication on any account.”

It worked by trying out a large number of passwords for the targeted Apple IDs. By default the tool came with a file—also called a dictionary—containing 500 commonly used passwords, but the list could have easily been extended.

Online services like iCloud typically limit the number of failed log-in attempts per account in order to prevent brute-force attacks, but Pr0x13 allegedly found a way to bypass those protections.

Pr0x13 claims that he made iDict public in order to draw attention to the problem and force Apple to fix it. “This bug is painfully obvious and was only a matter of time before it was privately used for malicious or nefarious activities,” he said in the tool’s description.

Apple was relatively quick to act and started enforcing rate limiting for log-in attempts done with iDict a day after the tool became available.

“iDict is patched,” Pr0x13 said on Twitter. “Discontinue its use if you don’t want to lock your account.”

This attack comes after the iCloud accounts of several celebrities including Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and Kirsten Dunst were compromised and private photos were stolen from them in September.

The company said at the time that the compromises were the result of a targeted attack on user names, passwords and security questions. Following the incident Appleimplemented two-factor authentication for iCloud accounts. Users are advised to turn on the feature.

iMessage "Waiting for Activation" error on iOS 9

Tired of iMessage waiting for activation error in iOS 9 or iOS 8.x on iPhone? Or is it just draining the last ounce of patience left in you? Despite our ‘been there done that’ experience, we’re equally skeptic about how to activate iMessage. Sometimes it works just perfectly, but sometimes it drives us crazy. There are quite a lot of fixes recommended almost everywhere but most of it doesn’t work. That’s what prompted us to test with a lot of iPhones and we ended up activating iMessage successfully.

Before you start trying out all these methods to get iMessage activated, you’ll need to sort these things out:

• Make sure in the Phone app, you’ve got your number listed. On top of ‘Contacts’ you should see your number listed (My Number:). If not, you’ll need to go to Settings → Phone → My Number and enter your number.
• Make sure Date & Time (under General) are correct. Set to ‘Set Automatically’ make sure the Time Zone is correct and the iPhone holds the right time.
• Also make sure you’ve got a working network. Wi-fi issues can cause iMessage activation problems so have cellular enabled.
  For some users, the message sent out for activation goes out as an international SMS. Make sure your carrier permits these and you have sufficient amount to send them.

1. Contact Your Carrier

First of all make sure that your carrier support iMessage or not. Contact your Carrier support team and verify any limiting condition on your for iMessage, blocks, or filters on text messages.

2. Airplane Mode

As strange as it sounds, may be you should try this method if nothing else works. We found the airplane mode activation mode in one of the discussions. It sounds simple and if it solves, that’d be good, right?

Here’s how it works:

Step #1. Go to Settings → scroll down and tap on Messages and turn offiMessage (also disable FaceTime)

Step #2. Turn on the Airplane mode. Wifi will be turned OFF automatically.

Step #3: Turn ON Wifi.

Step #4. Head back to Messages and turn-on iMessage.

Step #5. You’ll be prompted for your Apple ID if you haven’t added it yet. (else, you don’t get any notification)

Step #6. Now, head back to Settings and turn OFF Airplane mode.

Step #7. Mostly, you’ll be shown a notification that says ‘Your carrier may charge for SMS’ – Tap on OK

Step #8. If not, go to Messages, turn OFF iMessage and then turn it ON again.

Step #9. In a short while, iMessage should get activated.

Step #10. You’ll see a greyed out number and an email ID. A little later, the number should be checked and that’s it.

(This worked for us, seriously.)

More discussion at Apple’s forum

3. Apple ID Sign-out, Sign-in

Sometimes, you just need to sign-out of your Apple ID and then login again.

Step #1. Under Settings → Message, scroll down to where it says ‘Send & Receive’and tap on it.

Step #2. Tap on the Apple ID and then press Sign Out.

Step #3. Switch off iMessage now.

Step #4. Wait for a while (turn on/off Wifi) and then switch ON iMessage.

Step #5. Enter your Apple ID details now and try to reactivate iMessage

4. Reset, Or Restore

If things don’t work, you’ll first need to reset your location settings, then the iPhone. Reset is just a forced reboot so your data remains safe. After the reset, you’ll just login with your Apple ID and set up iMessage as new.

Should this fail, you might have to restore the iPhone as new or from a backup.

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Apple tries to let users enjoy a seamless iMessage experience but one thing that’s clear is that setting up and activating iMessage doesn’t usually work smoothly for all users. Try these methods and let us know if any of it worked. And we’re looking for more solutions too so let us know.

Bypass iCloud Activation Lock in iOS 9 or iOS 8 for iPhone and iPad

Lock in iOS 9 or iOS 8 for iPhone and iPad

While you have an iPhone in your hand, you are on “Activate iPhone Screen“. Now press the home button and tap on Wi-Fi Settings; now tap on “i” next to Wi-Fi symbol. From here, you need to follow below mentioned steps after removing the existing DNS. (In this situation, there is a way to help the owner get his phone back. Bypass iCloud Lock in iOS 9 or iOS 8 for iPhone. This method works from iOS 9.2 to iOS 8.)

Step #1. The new DNS you need to type in is as below:

• If you are in USA/North America, type in 104.154.51.7
• If you are in Europe, type in 104.155.28.90
• If are in Asia, type in 104.155.220.58
• In rest of the world, type in 78.109.17.60

Step #2. Tap on Back.

Step #3. Now tap on Done.

Step #4. Tap on Activation Help.

Once it is done, now you can see some text on the iPhone that reads, “You have successfully connected to my server.”

By tapping on Menu on the top right, you can access different functions like iCloud Locked User Chat, Social, Internet, Mail, Maps, YouTube, Video, Audio, Games and more.