Michelle needed a computer for her research, and Jeanne iPad mini just doesn’t cut it. So we decided that I get her an early ;) Christmas present: A MacBook Air. It’s small and light, the perfect ultraportable. As expected, build quality of the aluminum unibody is excellent. It has a 1.3GHz dual-core processor, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of SSD storage. And most importantly for an ultraportable, it uses the Intel Haswell architecture which has been especially great in terms of battery life.
Apple has released iOS 7 beta 6, less than a week after beta 5 which was delayed due to the developer site hacking. With this release, Apple is back on track on its release cycle. The main description of the release is that it fixes a major iTunes bug. I didn’t really encounter it. I couldn’t see any outward changes. In iTunes or elsewhere. Even the release notes is quite short. Looks like iOS 7 is almost good to go!
Apple has released iOS 7 beta 5 yesterday, less than a week after beta 4. I guess developer site hacking incident did disrupt the release cycle. After a day of use, I can see that battery life remains good. But it seems less stable (as betas go) and I’m getting more crashes. There are more UI tweaks especially on the Settings app: icons are more colorful (but still flat). Less like Android Jelly Bean :P
Apple has released iOS 7 beta 4. This one took 3 weeks. Either the developer site hacking incident disrupted the release or they’ve shifted to a longer release cycle as the beta stabilizes. It certainly looks like the latter to me. Stability and battery life were already good with the previous beta 3 and didn’t look like it changed much with beta 4. Most of the obvious changes were UI tweaks. Unfortunately they still haven’t fixed the Safari and Settings icons :P
At this rate, there’s probably going to be one or two more betas before the golden master and then the final around September or October… Along with the new iPhone. Or iPhones since a budget iPhone is rumored to be in the works.
Apple has released iOS 7 beta 3 to developers. Looks like it’s gonna be a 2-week cycle. The most visible change is the system font: thicker and more readable. Most importantly, it’s much more stable now. Haven’t experienced a crash or reboot since installing yesterday. Good going Apple!