When Apple released its object-finding AirTags back in April, it probably expected us to snap them on some expensive belongings. You know: wallets, keys, those sorts of things. I mean, you’re paying $29 for a single AirTag; might as well keep it on something valuable. But in the case of Matty Benedetto, creator and product…

Since Apple’s new cheese grater-looking Mac Pro was announced last June, the company has released a statement that the new PCs will be made in the U.S.A., specifically in Austin, Texas – the same place where Mac Pros have been made since 2013. This new Mac Pro will include parts sourced from 36 states; including…

These days, Apple can do just about anything with any of their iPhone cameras and turn it into in ad—be it amateur photographs on a billboard or entire video ad campaigns created under the direction of celebrity photographers. But their latest might be their most fascinating iPhone ad campaign to date. Tapping into the ASMR…

Did we hear you say that you’re exhausted due to the festivities? We got your back! Relax, kick your feet up on the lounger and take a few sips of pinacolada. Yes, this heat is killing all of us, but the sweltering digest for this week is super hottt too. Yup, talking about the week…

The news centered around Apple design icon Jony Ive departing the Cupertino-based tech giant to form a new design studio with fellow industrial designer Marc Newson has hit the mainstream. While it makes sense for somebody to want to shift gears after nearly three decades with the same company, we now have further insight into…

Mondays might not be your favorite day of the week, but the good news is that we’re all in this together ladies and gentlemen. As purveyors of prime Grade A web content, the SolidSmack crew has done some of the heavy-lifting to make sure you get your Mondays started on the right track. Welcome to The…

Back in 2001, when Apple was still known as just a computer company with fruit logos on its computers, it released the first iPod. Unlike other media players before it, this white block used a touch-based scroll wheel to play songs, skip tracks, and scroll through menus. This may seem old hat by today’s standards,…

Fans of open hardware that also just so happen to like using a Mac, your prayers have been… slightly heard? According to the internal service readiness guide for this year’s MacBook Air, Apple has made their new laptop’s battery a self-removable one. For context, ever since MacBooks and MacBook Pros with retina displays were released…

It’s always fun to see how products are made, but sometimes you need a dose of some good old-fashioned product destruction for stress relief, too. Ever since 1975, Utah-based blender company Blendtec has been making blenders that shred, maim, and well… blend ingredients into an easily digestible mush. Fast forward to 2006 and the rise…

Just over a year ago, SolidSmack reported that Astropad creators Astro HQ had successfully funded their latest project — Luna Display — on Kickstarter, having raised over $645,000 to bring the project to life. The (minimal) hardware and accompanying app claimed to seamlessly turn any iPad into a second display. Well, now it’s here; we…

You know what’s cool? Having the power of a PC in the palm of your hand. You know what isn’t cool? Not having the ability to use Photoshop when you have downtime on your travels. Well, this is about to change; iPad devices are about to get the FULL Photoshop experience. That’s right — you…

Welcome to our “Ask An Engineer” series, where Dan Slaski addresses questions that have you losing sleep or staring off into space during important meetings. Have a question for Dan? Send it in. Question: Management keeps saying they want us to be the “Apple” of our industry. How can I deliver on that? Dear Massively…

Despite its ability to coax millennials with its sleekly-designed products, the Apple name isn’t necessarily known for hardware durability. Ultimately, when your phone or laptop could easily become impaired from even the tiniest amount of moisture or a mini dust cloud, “sleekly-designed” isn’t going to cut it for many. In a recent iFixit article, a…

We’ve seen just how much potential there is for AR/VR headsets in the design and engineering world—whether it be modeling in the context of the real world or assisting assembly line workers. That said, we’re still on the cusp of knowing just how significant that shift can be. But when Apple gets involved—there’s usually a…

Threads were drawn across their arms, five arrows each, held by their teeth. Ten times they let fly. Ten times the ship shielded our descent. Dust blown, then settled, they were gone, and left in their wake, the skin of these links. James Gilleard – Love the mix of stylistic vector illustration with bits of edgy,…

It’s easy to overlook the cultural significance of the original 2001 Apple iPod these days due to a smorgasbord of mobile devices and streaming music services. Apart from being a design marvel, it allowed millions of music lovers to lug their favorite tunes around without having to carry a clunky Sony Walkman or bulky boombox—not…

It’s not very often—if ever—that a software app is made in response to a mass distaste for a particular hardware feature. And as Apple’s design team has learned time and time again, you can’t please everybody all the time. The most recent example comes from the “notch” in the physical body of the new iPhone…

Less than a month ago, developer Astro HQ revealed a clever update to their upcoming Luna Display app that sneakily turned the iPad’s front-facing camera into a contextual button while keeping the UI clear of clutter. “While Apple is taking away buttons, we found a way to add one,” said the company. “Meet the Camera…

Candles are typically manufactured with scents that put people at ease—such as those that invoke Christmas morning or the salty ocean air, among others. And in the year 2017, what could possibly put some people more at ease than the scent of a freshly-opened Apple product? Inspired by Apple’s own signature packaging ‘scent’, candle manufacturer…

With less than a day left to go, Luna Display from Astro HQ has already shot past their $30,000 Kickstarter campaign goal and is currently sitting at nearly $600,000. The Luna Display Mini DisplayPort or USB-C dongle, along with a free accompanying app, seamlessly extends a Mac desktop environment to an iPad using an existing…

You’d have to be pretty deep under a rock to have not heard about the latest iPhones by now. And while early performance tests are calling the iPhone 8 (nevermind about the more advanced, soon to be released iPhone X) the most powerful smartphone ever made (it’s not even close), the continuation of the same…

As fall beckons the inevitable release of Apple’s ARKit, more developers are releasing demos of what looks to be a big step forward into an invisible world parallel to our own. The latest foray into the ARKit by Japanese VR/AR/MR programmer Daiki Taniguchi shows just how close this augmented world is. Using a series of…

Ever since Apple’s beloved iPad was released, developers have been clamoring to create the ideal second screen experience. Now, over seven years since Steve Jobs presented the first iPad on stage, Astro HQ just might have cracked the code. The company—whom some might remember as the creators of Astropad, a utility for turning your iPad…

Last June 2017, Apple announced that it would be making headway in the Augmented Reality department with its new ARKit. Though they may be playing a wee amount of catch up with other AR platform initiatives such as Google Tango, ARKit is approaching it differently, aimed at augmenting your 3D space with a simple software…

As more 3D pros—and other creatives with system-intensive needs— turn to Apple for their hardware needs, it would make sense for the company to introduce a full-fledged workstation offering that is on-par with some of the more advanced Windows-based workstations on the market. And after years of speculation, the answer arrived on Monday in the…

While ‘razor thin’ is a great marketing term for promoting the Macbook Air, you certainly wouldn’t cut fresh fruit and vegetables with it like you would your paring knife. …Unless you’re Japanese artist Shimabuku. Known for his obscure sense of humor that pokes fun at the banalities of human culture and everyday life, the Berlin-based…

“You know the thrill of walking down a back alley in hopes you might find something amazing? I fucking live for that.” This is how US traveler Scott Allen opens up the About page on his website devoted entirely to hardware hacking and documenting his strange-but-true stories straight out of the world of technology and…

It’s been years in the making and one of the last dreams of Steve Jobs before his passing in 2011, but the new Apple heaquarters—Apple Park—is finally set to open next month. As one of the most future-forward buildings in existence, the ring-shaped headquarters is a modern marvel in sustainable architecture and operations, with solar…

Whether or not Apple actually makes a self-driving car for the masses or not, perhaps just as interesting is what the company would envision a car in 2020 to actually look like—you know, considering that it would be chiseled away by a team of the world’s most elite industrial designers. To give them a boost,…

When it comes to finding new uses for old tech, there’s more than one way to skin the cat. From turning an old tablet into a smart home controller to creating a dedicated home entertainment server with an old laptop, the possibilities for keeping your devices protected against the principles of Moores Law are seemingly…

Say what you will about headphone jacks, dongles, and the post-Steve Jobs era, there’s no denying that Apple is still somewhere at the front (if not the very front) of the pack when it comes to their collective of industrial design and design engineering feats. While some of their more recent design decisions might be…

If you’ve been paying attention to the Apple rumor mill as of late, you’ve likely heard that Apple is (supposedly) working on incorporating an OLED touchscreen trackpad to replace the function row of keys at the top of the new MacBook keyboard with a monster trackpad below – expected to be released later this year.…

While Apple’s industrial design team is known to sweat every last detail of a new product in their top-secret lab, a not-too-secret team of aftermarket hardware customizers at the ColorWare facility in Winona, Minnesota have been turning back the clock to keep the characteristics of yesterday’s Apple industrial design alive in 2016. Founded on the…

In the age of the iPad and Apple’s revolutionary approach to changing how technology is used in the classroom, it’s easy to forget where it all started: the eMac (or, education Mac). Originally designed as an affordable iMac option for teachers and classrooms, the eMac eventually became available to the masses due to high demand…

Despite revealing their anticipated new iPhone SE and a smaller iPad Pro at their Keynote last month, the most impressive announcement from Apple came in the form of Liam, an industrial robot designed to tear apart discarded iPhones. Announced onstage by the company’s Vice President of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives, Lisa Jackson, Liam is…

Forty years ago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne established Apple to sell the Apple I Personal Computer Kit. Designed and built by Wozniak himself, the first units of the Apple I Personal Computer Kit would go on sale just a few months later for $666.66 ($2,772 today) and effectively put into motion one…

Forget a smaller iPhone or iPad Pro, the real winner of yesterday’s Apple keynote was something that most people will never get to hold in their hands – let alone see. Revealed on stage by Lisa Jackson, Apple’s SVP of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives, Liam is an industrial robot designed for no other purpose than…

From Nintendo’s Virtual Boy in the distant past to the Oculus Rift now, VR has been sputtering into our future. This year however, is truly the year for VR (if there ever was one) with even more companies getting in on the advancements being made in replacing or augmenting our reality.

Historically, within the first week of any iPhone release, those in search of YouTube fame and riches have resorted to hurling their newly-acquired pocket computers towards the ground to perform various forms of “drop tests” (see: here, here, here, and here). Although the phones can be replaced for $50 under an AppleCare plan, the tests…

With the average individual expected to move nearly a dozen times over the course of their life, you would think that somebody might have figured out by now how to make the moving experience slightly easier – yet many still suffer from the experience of awkwardly hauling their sofas and tables up and down stairwells,…

As a highly versatile natural energy carrier that also happens to be the most plentiful element in the universe, hydrogen has been used to power everything from cars on the road to NASA space shuttles – but could it also be the key towards squeezing more battery life out of our laptops and mobile devices…

It’s been a long time coming – and many, many third-party stylus designs have come and gone – but Apple is finally expected to release a 12.9″ iPad model designed for professional creatives under the presumed model name ‘iPad Pro’ in the very near future, according to reputable KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. While Apple…

Although only a select few of the millions of iPhone 6 Plus models sold ever (reportedly) suffered from the effects of Bendgate, it would make sense for Apple’s industrial design team to avoid another PR circus centered around the integrity of their designs with the upcoming iPhone 6S Plus (assumed model name). In a newly-uploaded…

For most users who run Windows programs on a Mac, Boot Camp has always – and will likely always continue to be – the very best option for partitioning drive space without resorting to laggy virtual machines that can create problems down the road. With the recent release of Windows 10, users could install the…

For all of the ‘making of’ videos that go behind the scenes of how a product comes to life, it’s easy to forget that the product’s lifecycle goes far beyond where most of these videos end – which more often than not is somewhere between coming off the production line and packaging. In what is…

Of all of the things that came out in 1984 – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Spinal Tap, The Karate Kid, Transformers and the first John Hughes film, among others – an iPhone (or more appropriately – a Macintosh Phone) was not one of them. However, 1984 was also the year that Apple ran their iconic…

As if LEGOs haven’t already taken up our shelves and desk space, they may soon be traveling with us to coffee shops, meetings and anywhere else we take our laptops thanks to a new Kickstarter campaign from Jolt Team. The team – who describe themselves as “two guys building awesome products in San Francisco with…

Along with a host of other announcements at Apple’s Spring Forward event earlier this month was the announcement of an entirely new keyboard and trackpad system that focuses on more intuitive experiences and further flexibility for control. While the keyboard keys will provide a more touch-sensitive experience, the Force Touch upgrade on trackpads will offer…

Two years in, Google Glass has generated a lot of debate but very few sales. Yesterday, Google announced that it is ending sales of its consumer ‘Explorer’ model, amid leadership restructuring and a new focus on Enterprise solutions. This was not how it was supposed to be: Glass was created to revolutionize how we mere mortals…

For anybody who can remember using an original Macintosh computer in the 1980s and early 1990s, few could argue that today’s Apple lineup of computers bares any resemblance to the early computers that helped make Apple a household name. For a group of designers at the German tech blog CURVED, this was just as convincing…