Apple expands availability of 2-step verification to 59 countries

Apple has greatly expanded the availability of its 2-step verification process for Apple IDs. While it was only available in 11 countries previously, the feature is now available in 59 countries worldwide.

For those not aware, 2-step verification or authentication puts an extra step between entering your ID and password and logging in. It sends a verification message with a code to a preset device or number and only upon entering that code will the person be allowed to log in. This way, even if someone gets access to your password, they still can’t access your account unless they have access to the special code.

 

Apple 2-step verification is now available in the following countries:

If you have an Apple device, then it is highly recommended you enable 2-step verification for your account. Or for any other service you might be using that supports this feature.

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Tech Toys: Macbook Pro, Air and gift ideas for dad

MacBook Pro with retina display, Apple, starting at $2,230
Apple has upped the ante for laptops with its new MacBook Pro with retina display - the flagship computer that came out of this week’s announcements of software and hardware upgrades at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.
If you thought the screen on your HDTV was sharp -- consider the new Retina display on this 15-inch screen has 5.1 million more pixels, three million more than your HDTV. After this, everything else is liable to look a little blurry on close inspection. Apple has also packed the power of a desktop into a super slim case -- measuring a mere 1.8 centimetres in depth, just over the MacBook Air which is 0.68 at its thickest point. The MacBook Pro with retina display, with the retina display only available in the 15-inch model, weighs in at a tad over two kilograms.
Its flash storage starts at 256 GB and can be upgraded to 768 GB, although that will set you back another $500 on the 2.6GHz MacBook Pro, pushing the price on that one to top $3,000. The 2.3 GHz MacBook Pro with retina display starts at $2,230 in Canada. www.apple.com/ca.
MacBook Air, Apple, from $1,029
The MacBook Air lineup got a boost with the new Intel Core processors, faster graphics and flash storage that Apple promises is up to twice as fast as the earlier MacBook Airs. The 11-inch MacBook Air, with a
1.7 GHz processor and 4GB of memory starts at $1,029 Cdn with 64GB of
flash storage. Bump that up to 128 GB for $1,129. The 13-inch
version has a 1.8 GHz processor, with 4GB of memory and 128GB flash storage starting at $1,229 and 256 GB at $1,529. www.apple.com/ca.
Gifts for Dad
Xbox 360 320GB Star Wars Kinect Bundle, $400
From the R2-D2 and C-3PO-inspired controller and console to the special edition white Kinect sensor, this Xbox will let dad revisit his Jedi youth.
House of Marley Bag of Rhythm Portable Audio System, $350
Get this in time for your Father’s Day beach barbecue and you’re liable to draw a crowd. This isn’t your regular conservative and retiring black or white iPhone/iPod/iPad speaker dock. Instead packed into a canvas bag, measuring 11 by 26 by 10.3 inches and weighing a hefty 15 pounds, this has a fancy wooden panel with speaker grills on the top. It takes six D-cell batteries to power all this sound.

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Apple’s new MacBook Pro is the greatest, and perhaps final, version of the personal computer.

If Apple weren’t so orderly, disciplined, and predictably well run, you could almost call it schizophrenic. On the one hand, it’s the world’s most successful mobile technology company—the firm that sparked the smartphone and tablet boom, and the only one that’s reaping any significant profits from these new devices. Apple, more than any other company, is banking on what it calls the “post-PC” era, an age in which we get most of our stuff done on small, Internet-connected portable machines, not the hulking desktops and notebooks that now clutter our lives. Note that at its developer conference on Monday, most of Apple’s innovations were reserved for its mobile operating system. While it did announce several new features for a new version of the Mac OS, many of them—as Wired’s Steven Levy points out—were imports first invented for Apple’s phones and tablets.

But it’s too simple to say that Apple is giving up on PCs. Look at its amazing new laptop, which—clunkily and confusingly—is called the MacBook Pro with Retina display. That name suggests the new machine is closely related to Apple’s current line of MacBook Pros, which are stylish but pedestrian, old-fashioned laptops. The Retina MacBook’s real sire is actually the MacBook Air, the tiny machine that the company first launched in 2008. Over the last four years, Apple has transformed the MacBook Air from an expensive and underpowered novelty line into the best group of notebooks on the market. The Air—and now the similarly thin and light and flash-storage-having Retina MacBook Pro—represents the future of personal computing, while the standard MacBook Pro and the other computers in its class feel like pre-post-PC machines, devices that are hopelessly stuck in the past.

And that’s what I mean by schizophrenic: At the same time that it is killing the PC, Apple keeps extending the life of the personal computer with notebooks like the Air. That the same company is doing both these things is quite strange and spectacular—imagine if, in addition to building the Model-T, Henry Ford was also working on a way to breed faster, less smelly horses.

Apple isn’t really at war with itself, because in many ways the Air is a complement to the iPad, not its enemy. Well, that’s the case today, anyway. At some point the two machines will have to collide—either the Air or the iPad will win out, or we’ll see some novel combination of the two. Whatever happens, this much is clear now: If the once mighty personal computer is to have any future, the MacBook Air is its last best hope.

I first dove into the Air in 2010, when Apple released the 11-inch model for $999, a price I found irresistible. When Apple updated its Airs with faster processors last year, I traded in my 11-inch model for the 13-inch. I found both to be exceptional machines, the best portable computers I’d ever used. The Air does everything I can do on a standard laptop, but it has the size, weight, and battery life that’s more in line with a tablet. It’s also quieter than a standard laptop—it doesn’t have any spinning drives, and its temperature fan only kicks in when I watch too many Flash videos. While both the 11-inch and 13-inch models have slower processors than MacBook Pros, the machines feel surprisingly zippy, and are more than powerful enough for most everyday uses. On Monday, Apple updated the processors in its Air lineup once again, and it also reduced the price of its 13-inch model by $100. That machine now sells for $1,199, while the 11-inch Air still goes for $999.

At these prices, the Air is unbeatable. There are lots of computers that are cheaper than the Air—including several thin and light “ultrabook” laptops that PC manufacturers have released to mimic the Air—but they lack the quality and responsiveness of Apple’s machine. The cheap Windows ultrabooks I’ve tried have been blighted with poor trackpads, bad battery life, and glitches (for instance, a failure to respond quickly after being placed in standby mode). There are some well-reviewed ultrabooks on the market (like the Asus Zenbook), but these generally go for around the same price as Apple’s Air, and they’re still not as good as the Air.

Meanwhile, machines that are more expensive than the Air don’t make much sense. This is especially true of Apple’s non-Retina MacBook Pros, which start at $1,199 for the 13-inch model and $1,799 for the 15-inch. These machines seem to offer better specs than the Air—they have faster processors, optical drives, and more storage space—but I suspect that for most people, those specs aren’t worth the extra weight. Many people worry about the Air’s limited storage space compared with hard-drive based laptops, but I don’t think you’ll have many problems. If you separate your data from your computer using external storage—put all your photos, music, and video on a backup drive and on services like Dropbox—you really don’t need many hundreds of gigabytes of onboard storage these days.

If you study the success of the Air, and the efforts of PC makers to clone it, it seems obvious that over the next few years, every new laptop will have its thin and light frame. Apple has made clear that the new Retina MacBook Pro is the future of the MacBook Pro line; look for that model to get cheaper over time, and soon—if not next year, then certainly in 2013—it will replace the hard-drive-based MacBook Pro.

The mystery is what will happen to Apple’s laptop line as it picks up more and more features that we associate with the iPad. Like Apple’s tablet, the new MacBook has a Retina display, and it boasts seven hours of battery life, which is closing in on the iPad’s 10-hour mark. At some point Apple’s laptops will add touchscreens, too—touch will be too widely embedded in the computing culture for laptops not to have it. At the same time, the iPad will get faster and faster, in time matching the power of today’s laptops. And all the while, the Mac OS will keep picking up more and more features that Apple first showed off on its mobile OS.

What happens when these trends collide? In three years’ time, what will be the difference between a $499 iPad and a $999 MacBook? Will they be essentially the same machine, except that one will come with a keyboard and one won’t? The same question applies to Windows PCs, too, as Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 is meant to enable the convergence of tablet and desktop operating systems. Will there soon be no difference between Windows tablets and Windows laptops, either?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. But the dynamics sure are strange and fascinating to behold. Thanks to Apple, laptop computers have never been better. And, also thanks to Apple, laptops have never been more clearly destined for obsolescence. Let’s just enjoy it while it lasts. After all, a faster, less smelly horse would have been pretty awesome, no?

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5 Funny Siri Videos That Will Make Your Day

Start off your week with an interesting assortment of online clips mocking the personal voice assistant. 

 Siri, the personal voice assistant that has been a part of the iPhone since version 4S (and iOS 5), has been an object of ridicule more than that of admiration. This is not a surprise, because the programme has been known to make a lot of blunders, and often gives out witty responses to user queries. In this age of online video sharing, quite a few users have uploaded funny videos involving Siri, to share their joy with others. We have sampled a few such videos that will surely make you smile, and give a great start to your week.

In this first video, the user asks Siri some really dark questions such as looking for a bridge to jump off from, and how to hide a body. Siri is programmed to be an obedient assistant, and it obliges in its own manner.

 Siri is known to mess up when pit against any accent other than American English, as we found out ourselves. This next video put Siri up against a few accents to find out how well it fares. Understandably, the robotic assistant comes up with some witty responses.

Actress Zooey Deschanel (yes, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl), along with a few other celebrities, have starred in Apple commercials to show how useful and brilliant Siri is. The Conan O'Brien Team Coco site has posted a parody of her commercial that makes you realise how people can ask Siri really dumb questions. The thing to watch out here, is how Siri gets back at such people in its own humorous way.

The user in this next video apparently gives Siri a cookie with a few "home-grown ingredients". Take a look at how Siri responds, when it gets high.

We leave you with this really awesome video that was not made by Michael Bay. Siri reveals its psychotic side, as it does a mix of Eagle Eye and Transformers. The video will change the way you think about the apparent artificial intelligence aspect of Siri:

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Apple To Launch A White iPod touch?

Elusive white media player may be on the horizon as leaked photos appear.

Apple's long awaited white iPhone 4 had caused quite a stir, and now a website has posted photos of what appears to be a white version of the fifth generation iPod touch.
The website 9to5Mac, which posted the photos of the front panel of the device, have stated that while they cannot confirm the legitimacy of the photos, they do seem to fall in line with fourth generation iPod touch's build. These photos can therefore be of a scrapped white iPod touch 4 or even a fifth generation version of the same. It has cited Concord Security analyst Ming-Chi Kuo's earlier claim that a white iPod touch will be launched to be pretty accurate. Kuo had stated in the report that the new device will have a form factor similar to that of the fourth generation iPod touch.
The website cites iOS SDK data to infer that the new device will have more of internal changes than external ones. The new iPod touch could get a dual-core A5 processor and an upgraded camera. The website adds that Apple may be only considering the idea of a white model for the device, but might never actually release one.
The white iPhone 4 was released after a long delay of 10 months at the end of April this year because it was found to be more of a challenge than the black model. In an earlier interview, Apple's Phil Schiller had stated, "It's not as simple as making something white. There's a lot more that goes into both the material science of it and how it holds up over time but also in how it all works with the sensors".Considering the fact that Apple did bring out the white iPhone 4 after all, we think that a white iPod touch in the near future is a possibility. Be it white or black, it is a matter of personal choice at the end and we think there is too much of an unnecessary mess being made about the colour of the device.

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