Tech Today w/ Ken May

That’s the claim from TechCrunch, which says that Facebook’s special press event on June 20 will be focused in part on video and Instagram. [Read more]        

Solid-state drives are so speedy these days that that even a SATA interface might not have the bandwidth to cope. It’s a good thing that Samsung has started mass-producing the first PCI Express-based SSDs for Ultrabooks, then. The new XP941 series uses PCIe’s wider data path to read at nearly 1.4GB/s — that’s 2.5 times faster than the quickest SATA SSDs , and nimble enough to move 500GB in six minutes. It also ships in a tinier M.2 format that makes past card-based SSDs look gargantuan, even when there’s up to 512GB of storage. Samsung hasn’t named laptop makers receiving the XP941, although it doesn’t take strong deductive skills to spot one of the (probable) first customers. When Apple is shipping a new 13-inch MacBook Air that just happens to use a very similar PCIe SSD from Samsung, there’s likely more than coincidence at work. Filed under: Laptops , Storage , Apple , Samsung Comments Source: Samsung

After rumor upon leak suggested Microsoft was cooking up a release of Office for iOS, you’d think its arrival would be celebrated with streamers and cake. Making a rather low-key entrance, the app is now available to those with a small-screen iOS device and an Office 365 subscription. You can create new Excel and Word files from scratch, or view and edit spreadsheets, docs and Powerpoint files stored on Microsoft’s cloud services, or pinned to emails. Offline editing is also possible, as long as you’ve recently viewed or edited the file. You’ll also be able to see any files you recently accessed at home if your computer is running Office 2013 . You’ll need an iPhone or iPod touch running iOS 6.1 (there’s no iPad version just yet), and the app is limited to the US at the moment, but head to the iTunes Store source link for the full feature list. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in] Update: Check out our hands-on . Filed under: Cellphones , Internet , Software , Mobile , Apple , Microsoft Comments Source: iTunes Store , MS Office News blog , MS Office Technical blog

Late in the day on Tuesday, news emerged that Pandora had acquired an FM radio station in South Dakota for an undisclosed sum. Yes, you read that right. The world’s largest internet radio station is getting into the terrestrial radio business, and it’s not because Pandora’s trying to build out its antique antenna collection. Either Pandora’s trying to save money on licensing fees in order to improve its service, which is way the company says it’s doing, or Pandora’s staging some weird internet-meets-Earth publicity stunt, which is what it seems like the company is doing. Read more…        

Yesterday’s announcement of OS X Mavericks unveiled some pretty cool new features coming to your Mac—but Cook and co forgot to explain just which computers would support the new OS. Fortunately, Apple Insider has chatted with people familiar with the Mavericks Developer Preview to draw up a list of the Macs which are compatible with the software. Read more…        

Until now, multitasking in iOS has been fairly limited. Now, it’s going to work for all apps—and Apple says it’s going to provide background updates to all apps—and Apple says all those background cycles aren’t going to hurt your battery life. Read more…        

iOS 7 is here . It’s beautiful. You can cehck out all the details in our main post, but here is some video to see how it looks in action. You really want to see this. Read more…        

It’s been brewing for a while, and now Apple has finally redesigned its flagship cheese grater pro desktop . The 2013-era Mac Pro has been totally redesigned with a new, cylindrical chassis and vastly upgraded internals that have been designed to last for “(another) 10 years.” At the center of the new Mac Pro is a 12-core, 256-bit Intel Xeon E5 processor with 1,866MHz DDR3 RAM capable of 60GB/s data transmission. Following the trend of the MacBooks, the new power tower uses PCIe-based flash storage, and so pro users will be relying upon four USB 3.0 and six Lightning 2.0 ports (that can take up to 6 devices per port with 20Gbps throughput) for expandability. Fortunately, for those of you who intend on placing the hardware beneath your desk, the expansion ports light up to help you find your connections in the gloom. Other connections include HDMI-out 1.4, dual gigabit Ethernet jacks, WiFi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.0 and the usual pair of 3.5mm audio in and out ports. This machine is also the first Mac that’ll ship with dual AMD FirePro GPUs as standard, which’ll support 4K displays. Of course, the most striking change is in the design, which occupies 1/8th the volume of the current Mac Pro and stands 9.9-inches tall and 6.6-inches wide. The chance is thanks to a new thermal core, a triangular air duct that runs through the center of the hardware — with one huge fan mounted at the top. Presumably, this new model has also been tweaked to conform to new regulations concerning electrical shielding, meaning that the hardware can finally return to European shores when it arrives later in the year — at a (probably high) price that’s still to be decided. Gallery: WWDC 2013: Mac Pro Update: You can now check out our eyes-on of the new machine here ! Follow our liveblog for all of the latest news from WWDC 2013. Filed under: Desktops , Apple Comments Source: Apple

Apple today unveiled OS X 10.9 at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), showing off the first major revision of the Mac’s operating system since last year’s Mountain Lion . Apple has apparently run out of cat names and is now naming releases after places in California, where OS X is developed. The new OS X is thus named ” Mavericks .” Developers are being given a preview version of Mavericks today. It will be available to the general public in the fall. New features include tabs in the Finder, allowing multiple Finder windows to be drawn together in tabs. Apple is bringing tagging to documents—any tags you add to a document will appear in the Finder sidebar and in iCloud. Multiple tags can be added to each document, and these tags will allow new search capabilities. Mavericks will make life easier for users who have multiple monitors. Menus will be spread across the different displays, and users will be able to take a window full-screen on one display without disturbing the desktop on another display. HDTVs connected to Apple TV boxes can also act as displays. Mission Control has been “super charged for multiple displays,” Apple said, making it easier to drag apps and windows from one monitor to another. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

An anonymous reader writes “Google and Israeli start-up Waze have agreed in principle on a deal in which the search engine giant will buy the road traffic information sharing application for $1.3 billion. Waze, which claims more than 40 million users, describes itself as an app bringing together ‘the world’s largest community of drivers who work together to fight traffic, and save time and gas money on their daily commute.’ There have been previous reports that first Apple and then Facebook wanted to acquire the Israeli start-up.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.