I’m a strong advocate of the philosophy of buying the right thing once. My view is for any activity you care about a lot, it’s cheaper in the long run to buy an expensive product that will keep you happy for a great many years – maybe even for a lifetime – than a cheap product you’ll end up wanting to replace a few years down the line. Buy cheap, buy twice, as they say.

My hi-fi system is a great example. When I was a lot younger, I splashed out on a Bang & Olufsen hi-fi system that was more than twice the price of everything else I tested. Twenty years on, it now looks like an extraordinarily good value. It’s so old it has a cassette deck (yes, really!), but all it took to bring it back up to date was the addition of a simple Wi-Fi audio receiver to add AirPlay support.

Standalone Bluetooth speakers have therefore been of very limited interest to me – and I’d never have dreamed that one could ever replace a proper hi-fi system. So I was intrigued by one that claimed it could: the Devialet Phantom. As if that wasn’t enough to capture my interest, Devialet is a company with a serious reputation when it comes to high-end audio: they make the amps B&W uses to demo their speakers at audio shows. And yes, I’ll admit that part of what made me want to try it was my profound skepticism that any Bluetooth speaker could be worth $1,990 …

There’s all kinds of clever audio tech in the unit, but the core of it – what Devialet is known for – is what the company calls ADH, or Analog/Digital Hybrid. The unit actually uses both analog and digital amplifiers, operating in parallel. While audiophiles tend to be somewhat dismissive of digital amps, Devialet says that the combination actually delivers better results than a standalone analog amp.

A genuine class A amplifier directly connected to the speaker drives the output voltage: as the master, it sets the sound of the whole ADH core. That’s why what we hear is pure analog sound.

Several class D amplifiers are added in parallel to provide the speaker with the current it requires to sustain the output voltage. They act as slaves to the master class A amplifier, minimizing its workload.

Devialet uses the analogy of power steering. The driver (the analog amp) is in charge, but the power steering system (the digital amps) reduce the physical workload on the driver.

Most Devialet kit runs into five figures, so getting access to this technology for $2000 makes the Phantom, relatively speaking, a bargain. But let’s start at the beginning.

First impressions

Most product first impressions begin when you remove it from the packaging and take a look at it. Sometimes the packaging itself is pretty enough to become the first impression. In the Phantom’s case, I got my first impression as soon as the delivery guy handed it to me: this thing weighs a ton! Ok, not actually a ton, but 26 pounds. That’s an incredible weight for something so small.

The packaging is both beautiful and functional. You slide off the sleeve, then simply pull the box open, dropping the speaker gently onto the floor. This method ensures you don’t have to hold it by any of the speakers themselves, which would risk damaging them.

What you then see is something which looks like a cross between a vacuum cleaner and R2-D2.

Usually I can tell you immediately what I think of the aesthetic appeal of a design, but with the Phantom, it was actually quite hard to say. The resemblance to a vacuum cleaner is a little unfortunate, given the rather vast chasm in price between the two devices, but at the same time there’s no denying that it looks special. I think I’ll just call it unique.

Steve Jobs himself would have approved of the controls. There is precisely one: a power button that doubles as a reset button. Volume control is done from the music source, which is very sensible as you wouldn’t want to get too close to it when it’s at anything close to max volume!

It’s a Bluetooth speaker, so connecting to it is done in Settings on an iPhone and in the speaker selector in iTunes (you can, of course, also choose to output all Mac sounds to it, but I really wouldn’t recommend hearing system sounds through this thing!).

If you prefer wired connections, there are both Ethernet and TOSLINK ports tucked away inside a flap at the back. Pull off the power cable to reveal them. Which is one small complaint: the cable is yellow. Cables, where necessary at all, should of course be black.

The volume curve is quite strange when using the iPhone as the music source. If you use the volume buttons, there are 16 segments, and the speaker is really quiet until you reach about 11 or 12, then it gets very loud, very quickly. It’s a much more normal curve when using the volume slider in the Music app.

The standard Phantom is 750 watts with a maximum sound pressure – aka volume – of 99dB at one meter. That actually beats my BeoLab 6000 speakers – yep, the pair of them – which top out at 96dB. The unit I was sent is the even louder Phantom Silver ($2,390). This has an incredible 3000 watts of power, generating 105dB (remember, decibels are logarithmic, so 105dB is much louder than 99dB). Yes, you read that right: a single unit can actually output the maximum legal sound volume for … a nightclub.

I’ve never run my BeoLabs at max volume beyond a brief test, and couldn’t imagine doing so with this. When I did so briefly just to test it, I went and warned my neighbors first. As with my BeoLab speakers, even maxed out there was zero distortion.

The bass is truly something you feel in your chest. The frequency range starts at 16Hz, which is well below the threshold of human hearing, but you can definitely feel it. The top end is 25kHz – so it has serious range.

The bass was an issue for me. We have wooden floors and minimal furniture, causing sound reflections if speakers are not flat against a wall. Which you can’t really do with the Phantom, as Devialet says the sound is omnidirectional. That’s a slight exaggeration, as there isn’t too much direct sound pumped out at the rear of the unit, but it’s otherwise true, so it was actually quite hard to position without getting a double hit of bass – original and reflected. I had to position in right in a corner of the room to minimize this, and still needed to use the iTunes equalizer to tone down the bass somewhat.

But if you’re a bass fan, you will love this. Just make sure your building insurance covers destruction by sound waves.

There was one other issue for me. I like stereo separation, and this is a mono speaker. You can pair them up over Wi-Fi (in fact, you can network up to 24 of them), but you’re then looking at $4,000 for a pair, plus the cost of the $329 Dialog box needed to connect them. Sure, you’d be able to use the combined sound output to carry out demolitions of small planets, but even so, that’s a huge premium just to get stereo sound.

But if you can live without stereo separation (which I accept is mostly useful for live recordings), then in these days when you don’t need anything other than a Mac or an iPhone as a music source, the Phantom is essentially a complete, top-quality, room-filling hi-fi system in an extremely compact single unit. That’s a truly amazing achievement, even for $2,000.

Devialet Phantom is available from selected retailers. If you want something whose price is a little more accessible, Seth’s roundup of the best Bluetooth speakers concluded that the Bose SoundLink Mini II ($200) had the best sound quality, while the UE Roll ($90) was the best option for an extremely portable speaker suitable for outdoor use.

Filed under: Reviews Tagged: Bluetooth, Devialet, Devialet Phantom, Hi-Fi, speakers, Wireless speakers

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You wouldn’t know it based on the boiler plate release notes, but Facebook’s latest iPhone app update now includes a new 3D Touch feature on Apple’s latest iPhones. Pressing the Facebook app icon firmly from the Home screen on the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus brings up a Quick Action menu to do three things: write a post, upload a photo/video, or take a photo/video…

The first option lets you update your Facebook status which includes the usual location check-in options and more. The other two either let you quickly capture a video or photo and share one you’ve already snapped. Quick Actions support up to four options, so it’s possible Facebook could have a more context-based fourth option as we’ve seen in other apps.

I couldn’t find any examples of Peek and Pop, Apple’s new 3D Touch interactions used in other apps, within this update to Facebook for iPhone, and Live Photos are still just normal photos when you post them for now, but Apple says Facebook will support them before the end of the year.

Facebook-owned Instagram already updated for 3D Touch on the new iPhones, including Peek and Pop within the app as well as Quick Actions like Facebook, and Messenger recently launched its promised watchOS 2 app for Apple Watch, although the iPhone app is 3D Touch-less for now.

Facebook is also testing a new way to wish your friends “Happy birthday!” from the mobile app plus ways to express your reaction to statuses beyond like.

You can grab the latest version of Facebook’s app, version 41, on the App Store.

Filed under: Apps Tagged: 3D Touch, Facebook, iPhone 6s, iphone 6s plus, quick actions

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Some users on Reddit and Twitter are reporting that iTunes and the App Store are down. Other are able to access normally, suggesting that the issue is either small-scale or intermittent. Apple’s status page is not yet showing an issue, though it is common for Apple to be very slow to update the page.

The issue doesn’t seem to be specific to any one country, with reports from the U.S., Europe and Asia (including me in the UK) … 

The iTunes store is giving a ‘cannot complete your request’ message, while the App Store is proving unresponsive for those affected.

Filed under: AAPL Company Tagged: App Store (iOS), App Store down, Apple Inc, iTunes, iTunes Store down

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A New York federal judge has indicated that he is likely to refuse a government request to compel Apple to unlock a customer’s iPhone, but will first ask Apple to explain why decrypting iPhones would be “unduly burdensome.” The iPhone concerned is apparently not running iOS 8 or 9, and so Apple would have the technical ability to decrypt it.

The Washington Post reports that Magistrate Judge James Orenstein of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York is an activist judge who is believed to be attempting to open up public debate on the issue of privacy versus law enforcement … 

“He’s clearly a judge who is interested in opening topics to discussion in the judiciary, but he also thinks the larger public should know about the debate,” said Brian Owsley, a former magistrate judge in Texas who issued rulings that heightened privacy protections for the government’s use of cellphone-tracking devices.

Other colleagues and analysts have made similar comments, reports the paper.

Apple came under strong fire from law enforcement agencies after it boosted iPhone security in iOS 8 so that Apple has no access to the encryption key needed to access customer data.

If the government laid a subpoena on us to get your iMessages, we can’t provide it. It’s encrypted and we don’t have the key.

FBI Director James Comey said that this was a step too far.

The notion that we would market devices that would allow someone to place themselves beyond the law, troubles me a lot. As a country, I don’t know why we would want to put people beyond the law.2

U.S. Attorney General said that there needed to be a balance between privacy and law enforcement needs.

It is fully possible to permit law enforcement to do its job while still adequately protecting personal privacy.

Arguments have grown increasingly dramatic, the DOJ argued that iPhone encryption could eventually lead to the death of a child” and Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr, suggesting that the iPhone would be “the terrorists’ communication device of choice.”

The opposing argument is, of course, that if Apple builds in a backdoor for use by law enforcement, it is only a matter of time before it is discovered and used by hackers.

FBI Director Comey told Congress on Thursday that the administration would not be seeking a change in the law yet, but would continue to try to persuade companies to cooperate voluntarily.

Filed under: AAPL Company, iOS Devices Tagged: Apple Inc, Barack Obama, Encryption, Federal Bureau of Investigation, iPhone encryption, James B. Comey, Law enforcement agency, privacy, Security, United States Attorney General, United States Department of Justice

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Steve Jobs, the controversial Sorkin/Boyle not-quite biopic, achieved the highest opening weekend Per-Theater Average (PTA) of any movie this year, reports Deadline. The movie also gave director Danny Boyle the best ever weekend average of his career.

The feature grossed sizzling $520,942, averaging $130,236. By comparison, Boyle’s Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire (2008) grossed over $360K in 10 theaters its debut weekend, averaging $36K. The drama about the Apple founder, adapted by Aaron Sorkin, easily outpaced Sicario‘s $67K debut PTA.

It’s not an all-time record, though … 

Deadline reports that the average fell short of the $202k PTA achieved by one of my favorite movies, Grand Budapest Hotel, and the $158k of American Sniper.

The movie has of course been the subject of significant controversy, with some of those close to Jobs – including his widow – objecting to the portrayal, Tim Cook describing all the Jobs movies as “opportunistic” and Jony Ive saying that he didn’t recognize the man portrayed in the movie.

Others close to Jobs have taken a more nuanced line. Steve Wozniak said that while some of the things shown didn’t happen, he did feel like he was actually watching Jobs. Andy Hertzfeld said that while the movie “deviates from reality everywhere,” it does “expose deeper truths.” John Sculley said that it depicts “only one aspect of the man.”

Filed under: AAPL Company Tagged: Aaron Sorkin, Apple Inc, Danny Boyle, Michael Fassbender, Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs biopic, Steve Jobs movie, Steve Wozniak

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It was discovered by Larry Salibra and others that Apple has been disabling its Apple News Service in China. Perhaps most troubling is how Apple is doing this:

They’re censoring news content that I downloaded and stored on my device purchased in the USA, before I even enter China just because my phone happens to connect to a Chinese signal floating over the border. On device censorship is much different than having your server blocked by the Great Firewall or not enabling a feature for customers with certain country iTunes account. That Apple has little choice doesn’t make it any less creepy or outrageous.

The New York Times reports that Apple confirmed, off the record, that it is indeed turning off Apple News in Mainland China.

Apple has disabled its news app in China, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation, the most recent sign of how difficult it can be for foreign companies to manage the strict rules governing media and online expression there. Customers who already downloaded the app by registering their phones in the United States can still see content in it when they travel overseas — but they have found that it does not work in China. Those in China who look at the top of the Apple News feed, which would normally display a list of selected articles based on a user’s preferred media, instead see an error message: “Can’t refresh right now. News isn’t supported in your current region.”

China is Apple’s most promising market but unfortunately it is controlled by a government that wields total control over information and the media. Simply removing the news App might be better than running afoul of Beijing.  Google famously ran afoul of the Chinese government in 2010 after sustaining a state-sponsored hacking attack on its Windows computers and was effectively kicked out of the country. Only in the past few months have attempts been made to mend the bridges.  Apple certainly doesn’t want to hurt its cash cow over censorship. From a PR perspective, it probably doesn’t want to hand the reigns over to Beijing either.

I don’t expect this to change soon. 

Apple, as is usually the case in matters like this, hasn’t responded to request for comment.

Filed under: AAPL Company

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If you’ve ever tried to charge your iPhones/iPads/etc. directly from a small solar panel you probably know it is pretty difficult. Even with direct sunlight, you aren’t likely to be able to charge the device reliably. Most USB-charged devices require a minimum of 5W (5Vx1A) of continuous power to even register a charge. Then a cloud comes or the sun moves and you aren’t charging anymore.

Adding a battery to the mix helps, especially if the battery is big and can charge the device on its own without any sun. But most of the solar/battery combos fall into 2 categories: Either messy because they are a bulky 2 step solution or the solar panel is too small to make a meaningful charge and you are mostly using it like a regular USB battery.

SolarTab is a break of fresh air here. It is a relatively big 5.5W solar panel built on a thin 13,000mAh battery enclosure that fits in an included Moleskine-esque case. Size-wise, think the original iPad with a nice leather case and a huge solar panel instead of a screen…

This is the perfect large battery for a number of reasons. Because it is so thin, it fits like a book (or iPad!) in a backpack, briefcase or large purse. Most importantly, it always has power. I leave mine on my windowsill  for when I need to go into the city (usually 1-2 times per week). My iPhone and iPad usually die with heavy use so it’s a lifesaver for my trips home. What’s great is that I don’t ever have to plug it in. A few days in the window will have me back to full for my next trip.

This is a premium product with a Apple-inspired 4-LED battery indicator and solar charging indicator. It will charge a dead iPhone or more times to full. An iPad at least twice.

What’s perfect about the size is that the solar panel in direct sunlight can charge an iPhone or iPad by itself (5Vx1A speed) but you shouldn’t ever need this with the monster 13,000mAh battery. There are 2 separate USB out ports which each give you a relatively powerful 2.1A x 5 V or 11 Watts.  If you need to add charge manually you can do so via Micro-USB.

What’s more, with a USBA to USB-C cable, you can power (but not charge) the new MacBooks or a Chrome Pixel for about double their normal battery life. If the MacBook is asleep then you can charge the internal battery. It would be nice if on a future version the USB ports could support the 2.4A for the fastest speed on current iPads and more for the MacBook.

Overall, I’m very satisfied with the SolarTab. It really nails the solar-battery USB charger unlike any other product I’ve used before. You can pick one up at Amazon with $20 off coupon code 9TO5SLTB ($109 total) at Amazon or for $119 at SolarTab direct.

Other products to consider here from (9to59oys.com):

• Aukey 20W Solar Charger with Dual USB Port $40 w/code 7HP5VBL4 (Orig. $50) 
• KMASHI 10,000mAh External Battery Power Bank $9.29 w/code YTI7MT89
• Aukey Car Jump Starter and Portable External Battery w/12V Output and 400A Peak Current $50 w/code EAP8LOB2 (Orig. $70) | Amazon

Filed under: AAPL Company, Reviews Tagged: battery, iPad, Lightning connector, solar, Solartab

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Yet another leak has shown up of the rumored HTC One ‘Aero’, also known as the One A9. Although it’s shown up a few times in the past, never has it been clearer as to where the design influences have come from. HTC is expected to officially unveil the smartphone during a virtual event on October 20. Today’s leak comes via Steve Hemmerstoffer (aka @OnLeaks) and shows the extent to which HTC has gone to be ‘inspired’ by the iPhone 6/6s..

Previously, we’ve seen the device in six color variants, and this seems to be the ‘carbon gray’ (read: Space Gray) version of the smartphone. As we’ve seen before, the phone has an all-metal body with antenna bands running along the top and the bottom on the rear panel. The metal is slightly curved around the edges, while the four corners are rounded, presumably to give it a more comfortable feel in hand and a more ‘friendly’ appearance.

On the right edge, there’s a long volume rocker sitting above a heavily textured power button, while on the other side there are two removable, metal trays: one for a microSD card, the other for a SIM card. The bottom edge, much like the iPhone 6/6s, features a handful of machined holes for the speaker, a 3.5mm jack and the microphone as well as a non-centered Micro USB port. Also like the iPhone, the rear camera is housed in a slightly protruding metal ring on the back.

Apart from the slightly different shapes and placements of the ports and holes, it’s about as close to being an iPhone 6 as anything we’ve seen on the Android market that isn’t a cheap Chinese clone. The camera is centered, rather than being placed in left corner. The home button is pill-shaped, not round, and the speaker grille holes are more square. While HTC could argue that Apple doesn’t own the trademark for metal rectangles with rounded corners and edges, it’s hard to ignore the aesthetic similarities. It can be thankful it agreed a 10-year legal truce deal with Apple, otherwise it might have found itself on the wrong end of an expensive lawsuit.

Perhaps the one major difference is the top edge which is dominated by a large black panel, presumably placed there to act as a ‘window’ for an IR blaster, much like the dark plastic panel on the top edge of the HTC One M8 and M9. What’s interesting to note with this device, from what we’ve seen so far, is that there doesn’t appear to be any front-facing speakers, unlike virtually every other HTC phone currently on the market.

HTC has come under a lot of financial strain recently, and is releasing the A9 to help gain popularity again. While it may look like the iPhone from the outside, it won’t be priced like one. It’s rumored to be a mid-range device with pricing to match. It will be unveiled at an event on October 20, at which point we’ll found out exactly how similar this is to Apple’s own flagship smartphone.

Filed under: Tech Industry Tagged: Android, Apple, copy, HTC, htc one a9, iphone clone, lawsuits, leaks

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Great photographers are made, not born, and even the best photographers have plenty of unimpressive shots in their collections. But in the age of digital photography, it’s possible to create a great photograph without being a great photographer. You can even accomplish this days after snapping your photo, so long as you have the right post-processing software and a little time to play around.

Macphun’s Creative Kit 2016 ($90) provides photographers of all skill levels with six different tools that make bland or imperfect photos look great. This year’s Creative Kit includes the Pro versions of Macphun’s Focus, FX Photo Studio, Intensify, Noiseless, Snapheal, and Tonality, each renamed “CK” and expanded with extra features. All six of the apps are designed to be super easy to use, yielding great results even without diving into the manual controls, though there are rewards for tweaking their settings. Better yet, the standalone apps now work as plug-ins for OS X Photos, Aperture, Photoshop, and Lightroom, and can easily be used in combination with one another for even more powerful editing…

The six Creative Kit 2016 apps arrive as a single download with one installer. This is how the basic and Pro versions are regularly priced — bear in mind that Creative Kit 2016’s “CK” versions are all better than their “Pro” predecessors.

• Focus: $10 basic, $50 Pro
• FX Photo Studio: $15 basic, $25 Pro
• Intensify: $15 basic, $60 Pro
• Noiseless: $15 basic, $60 Pro
• Snapheal: $15 basic, $50 Pro
• Tonality: $18 basic, $70 Pro

Do the math and you’ll wind up with a cost of $88 just to get the basic versions of all six apps, versus $315 for all six Pro versions. The pre-order price of $90 gives you upgraded versions of all six Pro apps for only $2 more than you’d pay for all six basic apps; after October 14, the regular $150 price is less than half the cost of buying the six Pro apps separately. If you’re thinking of buying just two or three Pro apps, Macphun is effectively encouraging you to grab the whole Creative Kit instead. And that’s frankly a pretty good idea.

How do Creative Kit 2016’s Pro/CK versions differ from the basic ones? Each app varies, but they generally include plug-in support for Adobe and Apple photo editing apps, a collection of meaningfully better photo processing engines, batch processing capabilities, and some brand-new, CK-exclusive presets and filters.

Here’s what you can expect from each of the Creative Kit 2016 apps:

Focus CK

The point of Focus CK is simple: use post-processing software to mimic the depth-of-field effects offered by excellent lenses. Focus lets you choose an area of sharpness, then surrounds it with your choice of circular or linear bands of softness that create depth-of-field-like blurring. Presets enable you to quickly achieve appropriate “focus” for portrait, nature, architecture, macro, and tilt-shift photographs, while manual controls let you independently change the sharpness, brightness, and colors of blurred and focused areas. Beyond the speed and simplicity Focus CK offers, the power of its results — particularly tilt-shift-like blurs and saturation — is seriously striking, and masking tools give you pixel-level control over the effects if you want it.

FX Photo Studio CK

Macphun’s best-known app is also its most broadly-featured one: FX Photo Studio originated on iOS as a more powerful alternative to Instagram-style photo filters, and now possess an incredible array of over 200 filters and frames. The basic concept — use color-shifting, overlays, and underlays to make a simple photo “pop” — now has hundreds of possible permutations, injecting subtle or powerful colors and shapes into images. A single click on a preset is enough to make a dull image explode with improvements, while simple or full manual sliders let you fine-tune the effects. FX Photo Studio CK includes RAW support, as well.

Intensify CK

Intensify’s core functionality seems simpler than it is. Using presets (or your choice of manual histograms and sliders), it enables you to use colors and sharpening tools to reveal muted or hidden details in photographs — a great feature if you’re using a camera that produces sharp but flat-looking images. The results you’ll get from Intensify will depend on whether you’re trying to subtly enhance certain colors or really bring out buried elements in a picture, but the micro-sharpening, editing, and color adjustment tools go beyond what you’d find in basic photo editors such as OS X Photos. Macphun pitches Intensify as a way to recover the full dynamic range of photos lost when skies get blown out or shadows make things too murky, and it actually works.

Noiseless CK

I’ve reviewed the standalone version of Noiseless in greater detail here, and it’s a truly great app: using your choice of a bunch of presets, you can instantly reduce grain and blocky noise in images, preserving much (if not most) of the original image’s sharpness at the same time. While I’ve seen some debate amongst serious photographers as to how the app’s noise reduction compares against standalone apps costing twice as much as the entire Creative Kit 2016 package, I’ve achieved excellent results with only a few minutes worth of tweaking even when I start with deliberately miserable-looking photos, such as the one above, which was severely underexposed and had tons of noise to eliminate. Noiseless is one of my most-used Macphun apps, and will likely be one of yours, too.

Snapheal CK

I knew nothing about Snapheal before testing the Creative Kit 2016, but was amazed to see how well it worked for its single task: effortlessly erasing things from photos. Doing nothing more than using the cursor to highlight objects I wanted to remove, then hitting a large “erase” button, I watched as a doorknob disappeared perfectly — replaced by a regular length of door — then repeated the same trick to delete a plant in the background. Then I only had to tick one box (“local” rather than “global”) to near-perfectly remove panels from the door; I show the slightly imperfect (but easily corrected) result above. Snapheal accomplishes each of its erasures by analyzing the area to be scrubbed against either the whole of the image or the area immediately around it, operating as a super-smart healing brush. Even as a fan of Photoshop’s healing and content-aware filling tools, I was impressed by how well Snapheal worked with minimal user intervention.

Tonality CK

Like Noiseless, I reviewed the standalone version of Tonality here, and found it to be an awesome tool: Tonality turns full-color images into astonishingly beautiful grayscale/black-and-white photos, or similarly limited-tone sepia, blue, or other variants. Once again, the app’s focus is deliberately circumscribed to do just one thing very well, letting you use a large collection of presets to choose the way you want your image to look. If you thought there was only one way to make a black-and-white photo, Tonality will quickly change your mind, as it creates highly stylized renditions that could as easily appear in old-time newspapers as in modern art collections.

Creative Kit 2016: Is It Worthwhile?

As much as I enjoy composing photos that look really great without any post-processing, I’ve learned to appreciate the extra value that photo editing tools can provide. The Creative Kit 2016 lets you re-visit old images, making them look better than they did when you took them. As a package, it strikes me as a superb value at its pre-order asking price: even individual tools can produce results that range from dreamy to hyper-detailed to subtle or punchy based on your preferences and mood. And when you use two or more tools together, you can produce even more amazing results — akin to the output of a more expensive camera — as demonstrated by the series below.

Click to view slideshow.

I wanted to see whether I could use Creative Kit 2016 and an iPhone camera to replicate an image snapped with a $2,500 DSLR and $1,800 lens — with only 5 minutes of editing time. So I used both cameras to take roughly the same picture, then loaded Focus CK to replicate the DSLR’s depth-of-field. Using the app’s mask brush and eraser, I was able to easily draw atop the area I wanted to keep in focus, then use sliders to choose the amount of blurring, saturation, and blowing out of highlights I wanted to achieve for the background. Then, with only 1 minute to make level adjustments in Intensify CK (below), I was able to bring the iPhone image’s colors much closer to the DSLR’s originals. You can click on the full-sized images above to compare them.

Having shot digital photographs for over 15 years (and used photo editing software for at least that long), the highest praise I can give Creative Kit is that the six tools here routinely achieve different and better results than premium photo apps I’ve relied upon, including Photoshop and Aperture. Whether you’re a decent photographer looking to become good, a good photographer hoping to become great, or a great photographer wanting to create something iconic, Creative Kit 2016 will certainly have something for your needs. It’s a great investment in your past, present, and future photography.

More From This Author

Check out more of my How-To guides and reviews for 9to5Mac here! In recent months, I published a guide to turning your digital photos into beautiful wall art (see Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3), as well as a lot of different topics of interest to Mac, iPad, iPhone, iPod, Apple TV, and Apple Watch users.

Filed under: General, Mac, Reviews Tagged: Creative Kit, Creative Kit 2016, editing, Macphun, photography, post-processing

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Yesterday we reported on comments made by Tesla CEO Elon Musk during a recent interview with German newspaper Handelsblatt. The CEO, known for speaking his mind candidly on occasions, made comments that could easily have been interpreted as critical to the design of the Apple Watch and the quality of the company’s hires from Tesla, but Friday afternoon Musk took to Twitter to soften those comments.

His initial comments were in reference to the so-called “poaching war” between Tesla and Apple over automotive engineers. “They have hired people we’ve fired,” Musk said. “We always jokingly call Apple the ‘Tesla Graveyard.’ If you don’t make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple.”

Musk then briefly explained why he is not worried about Apple entering the electric vehicle industry:

Did you ever take a look at the Apple Watch? (laughs) No, seriously: It’s good that Apple is moving and investing in this direction. But cars are very complex compared to phones or smartwatches. You can’t just go to a supplier like Foxconn and say: Build me a car.

These comments were made last month during Musk’s visit in Europe, but U.S. media only picked up the comments yesterday and the CEO took to Twitter Friday afternoon to clarify:

Yo, I don't hate Apple. It's a great company with a lot of talented people. I love their products and I'm glad they're doing an EV.

—
Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 09, 2015

These comments shouldn’t come as a surprise since Musk has been vocal in the past about hoping for Apple to enter the auto industry with an electric car.

Regarding the watch, Jony & his team created a beautiful design, but the functionality isn't compelling yet. By version 3, it will be.

—
Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 09, 2015

Musk mentioned Apple’s Chief Design Officer by name to congratulate him and his team on the design of the watch. Coincidentally both executives were at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit earlier this week. Ive shared the stage with director J.J. Abrams, while Musk had a discussion with Y Combinator President Sam Altman moderated by New York Times and CNBC contributor Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Filed under: AAPL Company Tagged: Apple Watch comments, Elon Musk, Tesla Motors, Tesla poaching

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