Another possible explanation: The Apple Card’s magnetic strip is oriented on the flip side of where most credit cards strips are — on the bottom of the rear of the card instead of the top — and isn’t as obvious as most strips. It looks like a silver design element in contrast to the white, which may have confused some merchants.
Because there were no records of declines on my card, the only conclusion I (and Darnell) could come to was that the card had been swiped incorrectly.
As incremental upgrades go, the iPhone 11 family is pretty great. Focusing on cameras and battery life was the right call. Apple has lengthened its lead on the processor front while doing a good job of catching up to the state of the art in computational photography.
Most importantly, the iPhone 11 is a great mix of features at a very good price, and it’s now the default model in the iPhone family. That’s a decision that benefits Apple’s entire product line and properly places the iPhone 11 Pro models in context in terms of price and functionality. If you already have an iPhone X-class phone, you probably don’t need to upgrade this cycle. But if you’re desperate for a new iPhone that will give you more battery life or let you shoot better photos and video, this is the update for you.
If you're looking to live in Apple's mobile ecosystem, but you don't care about bleeding-edge OLED displays or attention-grabbing designs and premium materials, this is the way to go. Like the iPhone XR last year, we're giving it the Ars Approved badge and recommending it as the iPhone to buy for most people. Just be ready to spend a little more than the price of the phone on extras like AppleCare+, protective cases, or AirPods if you want the best experience.
From the original Inside Macintosh programming reference book from Apple: "Since Macintosh users usually divide their time among several applications, they would be confused and irritated if they had to learn a completely new interface for each application. [...] [T]he bread-and-butter features, the kind that every application has, should certainly work the same way so that the user can easily move back and forth between applications."
So, if every single credit card out there has the magentic strip at the top, shouldn't Apple's credit card also place the magentic strip at the same position?
~
Thanks for reading.
Earlier this year, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook commented on the importance of health to the company. In a statement that has been widely quoted, he said, “I believe, if you zoom out into the future, and you look back, and you ask the question, 'What was Apple's greatest contribution to mankind?', it will be about health.”
Although he only said it some months ago, it’s been a direction the company has been taking for years.
[...]
I meet the Apple executives, appropriately enough, at the Wellness Centre in the company’s Cupertino headquarters, Apple Park, and ask exactly where the focus for health and fitness came from, especially for the Apple Watch.
As modest at these two announcements were, then, it's clear that both Amazon and Apple have embarked on similar missions to extend their control of their customers' connectivity in and around the home. Amazon's Sidewalk, which operates on the 900MHz band typically used for amateur radio and emergency services, and Apple's close-range, ultra-wideband positioning with the U1 are designed to get Amazon out of the home and Apple inside it. Or at least give each company more power in their respective weak areas.
All this said, in short, a user has to either specifically want to do this procedure to their iPhone and take the steps to execute them, or be careless with device physical security and be specifically targeted by an assailant for it to be of any real concern.
If you're really worried about it, it's time to ditch the iPhone 5c or older that you may be hanging on to. And, you can always completely shut down your iPhone after you've left it unattended for any period of time.
A reboot will not just flush out the exploit, but also break any software that may have been installed in your absence.
“If you look at our corporate carbon footprint, over 70% is in the supply chain,” says Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environmental, social, and policy initiatives, who previously served as head of the Obama-era EPA. “And, of course, those aren’t facilities that we own or operate. But we wanted them to have this access to the same high-quality clean energy that we did.”
Thanks to Hollywood, every time I listen to Louis Armstrong singing What a Wonderful World, what's in my mind is the world ending with all humans being wiped out by virus, zombies, or time-travelling shenanigans.
~
Thanks for reading.
tvOS 13 is a surprising release. For years Apple has been pushing the TV app as the main draw of the Apple TV, then earlier this year it brought the app to Samsung TV sets with the promise of further expansion to Roku and Amazon Fire TV devices, along with a smattering of other TV sets. The proliferation of the TV app made the Apple TV seemingly less important to Apple, but in fact with tvOS 13, available now, Apple has launched the biggest tvOS update ever. Before getting too excited, know that the bar for “biggest ever” is extremely low in the case of tvOS, but nevertheless in a year when the Apple TV felt more marginalized than ever, it’s great to see new life breathed into the device.
On the heels of Apple TV Channels debuting earlier this year, and the new Apple TV+ streaming service launching in a matter of weeks, Apple has given the Apple TV an updated Home screen, multi-user functionality, brilliant new underwater screensavers, Picture in Picture, Apple Arcade aided by PS4 and Xbox One controller support, and even more. While it can’t compare to the behemoth release that was iOS 13, tvOS 13 remains a strong update in its own right.
With the help of three boutique distribution companies, Apple will be taking titles including Anthony Mackie’s “The Banker,” Minhal Baig’s “Hala” and the buzzy wildlife doc “The Elephant Queen” into select cities nationwide before the titles upload to Apple TV Plus, Variety can report exclusively.
Arcade’s debut, combined with new support for gaming controllers from Sony and Microsoft, makes the Apple TV something that the comapny’s never had before: a viable game console. No, it may not be competing head to head with the Xbox One or PlayStation 4, much less the upcoming next-generation of consoles, but it might pose a challenge to something like the Nintendo Switch. Yes, the Switch may have more to offer—primarily Nintendo’s legendary first-party game catalog—but it’s also more expensive than the Apple TV and doesn’t offer the same breadth of other functionality, such as a broad assortment of streaming services.
Apple has pushed out iOS 13.1.1 and iPadOS 13.1.1 to address some major issues, like the vulnerability that could give third-party keyboards Internet access without your consent.
Apple has released iOS 12.4.2, which provides a security fix for a remote attacker causing an “unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution,” exactly like Apple’s recent Mac-focused security updates.
Often, when new iOS jailbreaks become public, the event is bitter-sweet. The exploit allowing people to bypass restrictions Apple puts into the mobile operating system allows hobbyists and researchers to customize their devices and gain valuable insights be peeking under the covers. That benefit is countered by the threat that the same jailbreak will give hackers a new way to install malware or unlock iPhones that are lost, stolen, or confiscated by unscrupulous authorities.
On Friday, came the release of Checkm8. Unlike just about every jailbreak exploit released in the past nine years, it targets the iOS bootrom, which contains the very first code that’s executed when an iDevice is turned on. Because the bootrom is contained in read-only memory inside a chip, jailbreak vulnerabilities that reside here can’t be patched.
It’s possible (though not always painless) to live without a wallet — as long as you have a smartphone.
There are a few things going on in this update but without doubt the biggest of the changes is templates. As the team at Day One points out, sometimes a blank page is great for throwing thoughts onto. But sometimes you need a little more structure, too.
Is sleep-tracking worth it? If you’re not getting enough sleep, then yes, it probably is. Just like step-counting apps hack your brain into wanting to walk more, so sleep-tracking apps can help you to get more and better sleep.
That imbalance was on display in its partnership with Apple to launch a credit card, Goldman’s first. The cost of beating out other banks was accepting a number of demands from Apple, which is famously design-obsessed and exacting in its dealings with partners, according to people familiar with the matter.
[...]
When Apple unveiled the credit card on stage in March in Cupertino, Calif., it did so with a zinger: “Designed by Apple, not a bank.” Mr. Solomon and other Goldman executives watched from the audience. The same line was repeated in ads that Apple ran promoting the card.
In a final snub, Marcus executives weren’t allowed into a Tribeca loft that served as Apple’s command center in the days leading up to the card’s launch in August.
The company that most successfully harnessed the ethos of the libertarian counterculture to a new vision of ’80s-style consumer capitalism was Apple. As O’Mara puts it, Apple “bridged the hacker world” of local computer labs with the venture-capital–fueled “Silicon Valley ecosystem”: “While baking countercultural credentials into its corporate positioning from the start, Apple was the first personal-computer company to join the silicon capitalists.” Steve Jobs had been a member of his Homestead High School Computing Club, and his partner Steve Wozniak came out of the Homebrew culture. They took this ethos into the firm they built, which from its earliest days embraced the ideal of the personal computer as a symbol of individuality. Perhaps Apple’s most famous representation of this idea was its 1984 Super Bowl ad, which featured armies of faceless black-and-white clones moving in lockstep, subordinated to the images playing on a giant screen. Suddenly a lone figure broke free to destroy the mainframe, and then the screen went dark except for a glowing rainbow apple: “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’”
Apple’s vision of liberation, though, always meant the freedom to become fantastically wealthy. When the company went public in December 1980, its valuation quickly climbed above that of those staples of the old economy, Ford and Bethlehem Steel. By the end of 1984, Apple executives celebrated their triumph over the mainframe with 19 holiday parties, one featuring a Dickensian village peopled by performers in period garb.
If the Oscars continue to insist on giving out awards to movies with theatrical runs, will we see a new award show created for streaming movies, or will we see the dying out of award shows first?
~
Thanks for reading.
What this process appears to show is that Apple never sees, handles, or stores your device passcode or password in unencrypted form, and it never passes the passcode or password over anything but secure transport. It requires only your Apple ID account name and password, sent over HTTPS, as the first stage of logging into iCloud, but not for the later stages.
Overall, this new approach seems rational and secure. Apple would do well to give users more confidence in what’s happening by providing an explanatory support document, and I hope Apple will provide in-depth details when it updates the iOS security white paper for iOS 13.
The excellent power efficiency of LTPS, plus the way that IGZO handles lower display frequencies very well, is what helps make the Apple Watch 5 display special. Of course, it’s easier to do this sort of display circuitry manipulation on a smaller scale, so it might be some time before it appears in Apple’s phones and tablets.
The company has made overtures to cinema chains and consulted with an entertainment executive as it pursues a traditional theatrical-release plan that would keep its movies in theaters for weeks before becoming available on Apple TV+, these people said.
By reaching out to theater-industry representatives now and releasing films early, Apple is hoping to attract big-name directors and producers and avoid some of the tension created by another Hollywood newcomer, Netflix Inc., people familiar with Apple’s strategy said.
Apple TV Plus and Disney Plus are the next global streaming services slated to roll into Europe, joining Netflix and Amazon Prime Video in some of the world’s most lucrative markets. But along with the opportunities come local programming and investment obligations that the new players — including upcoming services Peacock and HBO Max — may struggle to meet.
Chief among these is a requirement that their catalogs offer at least 30% European content by the end of 2020. It’s still unclear how that 30% will be assessed — according to number of hours or number of titles — but officials are expected to clarify the issue by the end of this year. “It’s going to be a challenge for the European Commission to come up with a fair system for the quota,” says Ed Border of London-based consultancy Ampere Analysis. Counting either by titles or hours could be open to abuse.
First and foremost among them—for me anyway—is the addition of multicolored flags on iOS. 1 While this has long been supported on macOS, it’s one of those areas where the two platforms have been out of sync.
Apple added Xbox One and PlayStation 4 controller support in the updates, and after doing some digging, I can confirm that you can use multiple of either type of controller on one iOS device running the update, with each controlling a different player character.
The goal of Moon++ is simple. The moon you see on your Apple Watch will look like the moon you see in the sky based on where you are on the planet.
Much will be written in the coming weeks about how WeWork failed investors and employees. But I want to spotlight another constituency. WeWork’s fundamental business idea — to cram as many people as possible into swank, high-dollar office space, and then shower them with snacks and foosball-type perks so they overlook the distraction-carnival of their desks — fails office workers, too.
First, in your teens or 20s, as soon as you’re ready to take it all in. See it all, and learn. Get involved. Stay up all night talking with strangers, everywhere. Kiss and fall and promise to them all. Make lots of mistakes.
Cross the world the first time to fall in love.
In total, 19 localized Siri Grading jobs listings have appeared at the various offices, with Grading Analysts being the most common, with the Cork, Ireland, office seeing the most hiring activity so far. That office is where Apple recently laid off 300 Siri Grading contractors.
Most important, Apple’s descriptions of the features are written in plain language for casual users. For example, when Macy’s asked for access to my Bluetooth, Apple’s notification warned that the app could use the sensor to know when I am nearby.
It’s disturbing to realize by getting all these new privacy tools now that our data was ever exposed like this to begin with. These are all features we have desperately needed in the constant struggle to protect our digital privacy.
Apple goes over a laundry list of problems that could arise if your display is swapped the wrong way or with a non-genuine part, such as multi-touch problems, issues with screen color accuracy and brightness, or True Tone failing to work properly. “Additionally, repairs that don’t properly replace screws or cowlings might leave behind loose parts that could damage the battery, cause overheating, or result in injury.”
Sitting between two national parks in Kenya, the Chyulu Hills are home to large populations of elephants and other wildlife. The area is also the site of Apple’s latest donation, as the tech company looks for new solutions to climate change that can be replicated at scale.
The company is working with the nonprofit Conservation International to restore degraded grasslands in the area. “By restoring tens of thousands of hectares in the Chyulu Hills, we can remove carbon from the air, protect a critical wildlife corridor for elephants, and support the livelihoods of the Maasai people,” says Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environmental, social, and policy initiatives, who formerly served as head of the EPA.
The tvOS 13 update for Apple TV set-top boxes rolled out yesterday, and now Apple has started rolling out the new ‘under the sea’ screensavers produced in coordination with the BBC.
There are ten new underwater ‘Aerial’ screensavers offering a beautiful look at corals, shoals of fish, and generally stunning imagery of sea life.
TuneIn, a live global streaming and on-demand audio service, has teamed up with Apple to offer listeners access to TuneIn’s more than 100,000 global radio stations on all Siri-enabled devices and Apple Music.
The Apple Watch Noise app is surprisingly accurate (not unlike the heart rate sensor), and noise alerts will be practical for knowing when ear protection should be used.
The band collaborated with Apple for the branded project because the company has already established the Memories feature, which automatically curates digital photo and video albums for users based on their past events and visited locations. Now, Maroon 5 fans can use the app-suggested “Memories” track as the soundtrack for their Memories movies, which are activated when users press the play button on any curated collection.
My father was an insurance agent with his office in a big 3 story office mall. The parking lot for this building must have had room for 500 cars and almost never completely filled up but my father made a point to always park as far away from the front door as possible. Even on 30 below zero days with 3 feet of fresh snow on the ground, he would not waver and park any closer to the front door. At a young age, I asked him why he parked so far away and he told me the experience his customers have while visiting him was very important to him and it started when they pulled into the parking lot. In his view, they should have front row parking.
If fuzzy metrics like “engagement” and potentially misleading metrics like “time spent” are used to judge how developers are paid, if a game like Possessions is at a disadvantage because it’s short, why wouldn’t they come back with a second game designed to keep the player around longer? Doesn’t that quickly lead us down the same toxic rabbit hole of exploitative player experiences that lead to the creation of Apple Arcade in the first place?
Honestly, I have no idea what I am playing in the iPhone's Mario Kart Tour. Too may stars and coins and gifts and what-nots, when all I want to do is race.
~
Thanks for reading.
Apple released three major new operating system updates today, following the release of iOS 13 for iPhones and iPods last week. iPadOS brings the changes and features of iOS 13 to the iPad, plus a plethora of new tablet-specific functionality as the iPad's operating system officially branches away from the iPhone for the first time. iOS 13.1 fixes numerous bugs and brings a few features to iPhones that were originally planned for iOS 13. And tvOS 13 adds Apple Arcade, new game controller support, multi-user functionality, and more to supported Apple TV devices.
This bug [...] may allow third-party keyboards to gain full access permissions — even if it was not approved. [...] The bug will be fixed in an upcoming software update.
A squid’s siphon helps it move, breathe, and discharge waste, so having the siphon in back makes more sense than having it in front. Now, the poor squid emoji will look like it should, without a siphon on its front.
Earlier today, Mac video professionals began reporting that their computers were crashing, and many attributed the problem to Avid’s Media Composer editor. The issue instead lies with a piece of Google software that helps keep Chrome up-to-date.
Version 1.2.13.75 of Google Keystone (Google Software Update) recently shipped with a bug that damages the macOS file system on computers where System Integrity Protection is disabled. Also known as SIP, the OS security feature helps “prevent potentially malicious software from modifying protected files and folders on your Mac.” This issue also affects Macs that do not support SIP (pre-OS X El Capitan).
One of my favorite things about Drafts is its quick adoption of the new OS features that come year-over-year. Not only are they quickly adopted, but they are well implemented, carefully considered, and provide increased capability for both existing and new users alike.
This year with the release of iOS 13, iPadOS 13, and macOS Catalina, Drafts gains an updated look, improvements to the interface and navigation, full iPadOS support, and greatly improved Shortcuts integration. While this may not seem like a big list, I can assure you that the new features of the app are fantastic, and have made a monumental improvement to my daily workflows.
The kart racer title for mobile is set in the Mushroom Kingdom, where players are tasked with racing to beat their rivals to the finish line using drifts and items to gain an edge. Players slide their fingers across the screen to turn, while tapping the screen unleashes stored items.
This announcement from Apple follows similar deadlines for iOS 13 and watchOS 6 applications.
I didn't think I will miss it, but I do miss the big album cover art on my iPhone's lock screen. Maybe one day, Apple will allow for customizations on the lock screen, with complications and what-nots, and we'll may get the big album cover art back, if we want to.
I still dislike Cover Flow though, and I'm glad it is (mostly) gone.
~
I'm currently in old-media phase. For my audio entertainment, I'm going through the Stephen Fry's audiobooks of the Harry Potter books for the first time, and I am enjoying having Stephen Fry's voice in my ears. For my video entertainment, I am going through all twelve seasons of Big Bang Theory, now that the sitcom is on Netflix. In this day and age, I still enjoy watching a traditional laugh-track-infused comedy show, although I can't think of another traidtional sitcom that I will want to watch after this.
And, of course, if you are a fan of Big Bang Theory, you will have already know what is going to happen to me. Yes, Sheldon has just unleashed a couple of Harry Potter spoilers on me.
:-)
~
Thanks for reading.
Adobe’s new painting and drawing app, Fresco, launches today on iPad. The next-generation tool promises an illustration experience with an unprecedented level of fidelity to traditional oil and watercolor paints. Alongside Fresco’s launch, Adobe is teaming up with Apple and The Big Draw for an entire month of Today at Apple sessions at every Apple Store in the world.
[...]
Fresco’s spotlight feature is Live Brushes powered by Adobe Sensei. These sophisticated tools push beyond traditional pixel or vector-based brushes, simulating the physics and chemical interactions of real paints. The app borrows interface elements and interaction models from Photoshop on iPad, Adobe’s other upcoming iPad app.
Apple Inc. said the next version of its high-end Mac Pro desktop computer will be assembled in Texas after the company received tariff waivers on key components.
The new model will be produced in the same factory in Austin operated by Flex Ltd. that has produced the previous Mac Pro since 2013, Apple said in a statement Monday. Manufacturing of the new model was “made possible” after the U.S. government approved on Friday Apple’s request for a waiver on 25% tariffs on 10 key components imported from China. The company was granted exclusions on several parts, including processors, power components and the computer’s casing.
Film and TV editors across Los Angeles were sweating Monday evening as their workstations were refusing to reboot, resulting in speculations about a possible computer virus attack. Social media reports suggested that the issue was widespread among users of Mac Pro computers running older versions of Apple’s operating system as well as AVID’s Media Composer software.
Exclusive: Conservation and the Impact of Climate Change will feature filmmakers Victoria Stone and Mark Deeble, who co-created, produced, and filmed the Apple Original “The Elephant Queen.”
[...]
Design Lab: Space Adventures with the Peanuts Gang is a lighthearted session that will guide participants through illustrating an astronaut in the iconic Peanuts style using Procreate on an iPad Pro. The September 28 session promotes “Snoopy In Space,” another Apple Original coming to Apple TV+ at launch.
Real-time lyrics launched last week as part of Apple's new iOS 13 operating system, and allows users to display song lyrics, karaoke-style, while a song is playing. The new landing page is intended to "celebrate this new frontier in the listening experience," according to its page description.
If you want to know how sold I was on CarPlay, you needn’t look any further than my experiences installing a new head unit in my car in order to get it. A few months later, this has proved to be an altogether excellent choice, with no real downsides.
But within a few days of using and loving CarPlay, I’d already run into a handful of things that could be made even better with a little adjustment. And the good news is that, as of iOS 13, Apple mostly delivers on a couple of the most significant ones.
Headlining today’s update are a pair of new augmented reality features. Multiplacement allows people to try out several items at once to see how they look, using augmented reality to visualize their placement in their current room.
Furthermore, a new room sets feature allows people to map out an entire room with new furniture to see how it would look.
My goal on the night I signed up for Apple Arcade was to play through a dozen or so games for a few minutes each, and then figure out where to go from there. Instead, I was forced to huddle up against a wall to keep my phone from dying because I’d spent the last three hours ignoring the latest Cubs meltdown on TV and playing round after round of Grindstone, the latest game from Capy Games (Below, Super Time Force). Grindstone is f’ing awesome.
"The structural grid gives the entire volume a certain rhythm, while the calm interior is enhanced by the bamboo that lines the perimeter," said Behling.
Where you are is partially defined by where you are not. When you’re somewhere, you’re not somewhere else. But when you use your phone, you’re everywhere. You keep in touch with friends. You hear what’s going on at home. You see the screen exactly as you do anywhere else.
It’s wonderful to be cut off from everywhere else — to be more fully only there.
Depending on whom you ask, 2012 represented the apex, the inflection point, or the beginning of the end for Silicon Valley’s startup scene—what cynics called a bubble, optimists called the future, and my future co-workers, high on the fumes of world-historical potential, breathlessly called the ecosystem. Everything was going digital. Everything was up in the cloud. A technology conglomerate that first made its reputation as a Web-page search engine, but quickly became the world’s largest and most valuable private repository of consumer data, developed a prototype for a pair of eyeglasses on which the wearer could check his or her e-mail; its primary rival, a multinational consumer-electronics company credited with introducing the personal computer to the masses, thirty years earlier, released a smartphone so lightweight that gadget reviewers compared it to fine jewelry.
Technologists were plucked from the Valley’s most prestigious technology corporations and universities and put to work on a campaign that reëlected the United States’ first black President. The word “disruption” proliferated, and everything was ripe for or vulnerable to it: sheet music, tuxedo rentals, home cooking, home buying, wedding planning, banking, shaving, credit lines, dry-cleaning, the rhythm method. It was the dawn of the unicorns: startups valued, by their investors, at more than a billion dollars. The previous summer, a prominent venture capitalist, in the op-ed pages of an international business newspaper, had proudly declared that software was “eating the world.”
Not that I was paying any attention. At twenty-five, I was working in publishing, as an assistant to a literary agent, sitting at a narrow desk outside my boss’s office, frantically e-mailing my friends. The year before, I’d received a raise, from twenty-nine thousand dollars to thirty. What was my value? One semester of an M.F.A. program; fifteen hundred chopped salads, after taxes. I had a year left on my parents’ health insurance.
I look at my iPhone, lying on the desktop, next to my keyboard, and wonders: why aren't you always on?
:-)
~
Thanks for reading.
Apple today announced that Oprah’s Book Club is today launching inside Apple Books, and an Apple TV+ show of the same name will be available starting November 1st.
The exclusive TV series will feature interviews with authors of the featured books, with new episodes released every two months.
It seems like just yesterday that Oprah announced her last Oprah's Book Club Pick in 2018: Michelle Obama's best-selling memoir, Becoming. And while it could be difficult to follow former first lady of the United States, we think Lady O's latest choice page-turner—her 81st ever selection, and her first as part of her new book club iteration with Apple—is the perfect follow-up. Ready for the big reveal? It's Ta-Nehisi Coates' new novel, The Water Dancer.
“I have not felt this way about a book since Beloved,” says Oprah, referring to the late Toni Morrison's celebrated novel. "I knew early on the book was going to cut me up. I ended up with my soul pierced.”
[...]
“Every sentence is about ‘then’ but it’s also about ‘now,'" Oprah says. "I realized that those who did run, they had to do it…they couldn’t stay. They had to risk everything.”
In a new ‘Stories to believe in’ campaign, Apple is airing 15-second clips of its hero shows, online and on TV. It screened a handful during the Emmy Awards ad breaks (via ScreenTimes). This includes clips for The Morning Show, See, For All Mankind and Dickinson.
The InnerVoice app — created by Guggemos and his business partner — is an award-winning communication tool for children with autism that teaches social communication skills using engaging animated 3-D avatars of themselves, characters or favorite toys.
“It’s just using phones to activate natural learning processes,” said Guggemos.
For example, Jacobson said he joined Yahoo after the company acquired his previous employer, the smart inbox service Xobni. At the time, everyone assumed that when it came to helping users find things in email, “search is the way to go.” (Note: Yahoo, like TechCrunch, is owned by Verizon Media.)
Instead, he said it turns out “people just don’t know or want to have to figure out what to type into that imposing white box to find the thing that they’re looking for.”
So Yahoo Mail now offers a number of different views that should help you find stuff without searching, by focusing on specific types of content from your inbox.
Yet, for millions of middle school and high school students around America, the graphing calculator is still a required standard — and TI controls an estimated 80% of the $300m+ market.
An obsolete piece of technology has managed to maintain a stranglehold on an increasingly tech-savvy education market. But it appears that the rise of new, free-to-use technology is starting to chip away at this empire.
We all know that streaming has changed the way we listen to music, but it’s also changing the way artists write and release music. With streaming, artists can instantly put their music online, which lets them test out songs, release music on a whim, or even adjust albums after they’re released. Charli has always been at the cutting edge of pop, and she has built a career around disregarding norms, including traditional release structures. It’s increasingly becoming a trend as more artists are leaving the tried and true album cycle behind.
There’s nothing like setting up a fresh new phone out of the box, is there? And if you’ve picked up a new iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro or iPhone 11 Pro Max, there’s certainly a lot of features to tinker with, from their advanced multi-lens camera systems to all the new capabilities that come with iOS 13.
Before you do anything else with your new iPhone, we’ve identified 10 settings you should enable, disable or simply check out on your brand new handset.
The new one-of-a-kind displays at Apple Park Visitor Center come in addition to merchandising and design changes that rolled out to Apple Stores across the world on September 20. You can check out the new three-dimensional window displays, in-store graphics, and Apple Watch Studio in our in-depth gallery and hands-on experience.
I’m only about 36 hours into testing iPhone 11, but I’m already looking forward to shooting Halloween and Christmas scenes in Night Mode later this year — and all the moments before then that couldn’t be captured without the new camera feature.
Some people will no doubt download absolutely everything and then randomly pick things to check out until something clicks (hi, it me). That's a perfectly reasonable approach to take, but some of us have tighter constraints on our time.
Lucky for you, I play lots and lots of games, and I've spent the past week tooling around with every Apple Arcade game I had time for. I still haven't touched every single one – it's a lot to go through! – but I've played enough to get a good feel for what's on offer and single out some favorites.
Toward the end of music legend Neil Young’s recent memoir, he makes an admission: “I was wrong.”
The book, To Feel the Music: A songwriter’s mission to save high-quality audio, is something of a postmortem on the musician’s high-resolution download service which folded in 2017.
U.S. trade regulators on Friday approved 10 out of 15 requests for tariff exemptions filed by Apple Inc amid a broader reprieve on levies on computer parts, according to a public docket published by the U.S. Trade Representative and a Federal Register notice.
The move by U.S. officials could make it easier for both Apple and small makers of gaming computers to assemble devices in the United States by lowering the costs of importing parts.
The stars are aligned... and I ended up having American fast food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner today. (Okay, strictly speaking, I didn't have lunch. I've just finished up what my daughter didn't finish for her lunch.)
If you must know: fish sandwich, left-over breakfast muffin, and pizza.
~
I am jealous of all the Night Mode pictures out there. Then I remember that I am seldom outside at night.
~
Thanks for reading.
The iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max include a dynamic power management system — a combination of hardware and software — that should make them less susceptible to performance throttling symptoms as the battery ages and battery health degrades over time.
Apple has said that newer iPhone models have more advanced power-monitoring hardware, which should reduce the impact of throttling. That advanced hardware was present on the iPhone 8 and X, which got the processor throttling feature in an update this time last year, as well as the XR and XS.
iFixit did a livestream this year of its iPhone 11 Pro teardown. Now it is diving in and analyzing all of its findings. Notably, iFixit has noticed a new board in the iPhone 11 Pro Max that was may have been included for the bilateral wireless charging feature that was expected but didn’t end up shipping with this year’s iPhones.
I can confirm that there are references to three new Smart Battery Case models that can be found inside iOS 13.1. The model codes are A2180, A2183 and A2184, presumably for the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max, respectively.
We don’t know when Apple plans to release the new cases, but given their presence in iOS 13.1, it’s likely they’ll be announced in time for the holiday shopping season.
Apple finally added support for STIR/SHAKEN with iOS 13, which should be great news in theory, adding millions of new devices that will now get this verification technology. But there’s just one problem: Apple’s implementation of the feature is essentially useless for actually identifying incoming robocalls, rendering the whole thing moot.
Today, we’ll take a look at Dark Mode on the iPhone, assess Apple’s latest efforts on privacy and augmented reality, and examine the changes to the most overhauled apps, including Maps, Photos, and more. There’s frankly more in this update than we can get to in one article (even though several thousand words await you, dear reader), but we've been spending a lot of recent time with iOS 13 in order to thoroughly consider Apple's most significant changes, like those to Reminders and Files, for example.
We’ll also consider what all these changes mean for the future direction of iOS, which is gradually evolving away from its original philosophy of user experience.
watchOS 6 flew under the radar at the packed and exciting WWDC keynote this June. It isn’t the most flashy update, but the Apple Watch had enough flashy updates in its early years to last a while longer. This is a year for iteration, and Apple has been iterating on all cylinders. watchOS 6 is a quiet giant, adding or redesigning more first-party apps at once than we’ve seen in years, dropping the largest batch of new watch faces since watchOS 1, providing a new way to track fitness over time, and kicking off a nascent foray into Apple Watch independence. Let’s see how Apple did.
Apple has uploaded a new video titled 'iPhone 11 Pro Behind the Scenes — First look at the new triple-camera system' to YouTube, showing users how the three lenses work at the same distance.
The higher-rated power adapter means you can charge the iPhone 11 a lot faster. With the USB-C brick, you will fast charge from 0% to 50% in about 30 minutes. A full charge to 100% should take about an hour and a half.
The text-editing gesture is affecting gameplay as it steals touches from the game, even though there are no textfields visible. This affects lots of apps but especially games that involve players regularly having three fingers on the display, like first-person shooters. The problem is so bad that PUBG is even displaying a warning message in the game.
Luckily, the fix is not too many days away. The text editing configuration options will be correctly respected in iOS 13.1.
The sixth major version of the excellent iOS dictionary app weds two important themes: adopting all the relevant functionality enabled by Apple’s latest OS releases, while simultaneously adding substantial features like quizzes, translation, full navigation via keyboard, and more.
Making games should be a viable career for artists outside of the mainstream. So we, as consumers, need to be mindful of who is and isn’t getting paid when we sign up for Apple Arcade and Xbox Games Pass. Will this monthly fee allow the developers making games we love to continue to exist? And if this won’t, what will? Because if that’s not something that we take seriously, with consumer action or market regulation or some other solution, then the space for viable and interesting indie games to exist might get a lot smaller sometime soon.
On September 20, 1989, Apple product chief Jean-Louis Gassée stood on a stage in Universal City, California, and unveiled a new computer, the Macintosh Portable. It was Apple’s first battery-powered Mac, and the goal, Gassée declared, was to build a portable Mac that was every bit as powerful and usable as the familiar desktop models: “No subset of applications, no Mac Jr., no compromise.”
As he promised, the Mac Portable was a really good Mac. Its most eye-grabbing feature was the screen. It measured 9.8″—larger than the screen on a classic desktop Mac—and was a monochrome active-matrix LCD, which made it highly legible by the standards of the time, even though it wasn’t backlit. The computer used a lead-acid battery, which sounded like old technology even then but helped deliver marathon battery life: Apple claimed 10 hours on a charge vs. the two to three hours that was common at the time.
When my kids were born, in 2005 and 2009, and I mounted photo after photo of them on Facebook with overworked captions, I envied them being born into a digital world. Lucky kids, they also had me—a chic internet habitué, not some Luddite rube afraid of her own shadow online, terrified of selfies and convinced she might restrict her household to 20 minutes a day “on the internet,” as if anyone in our time ever fully gets off.
I looked on proudly as the kids walked around our block, trying out my Google Glass (at my insistence), easily mastering the flash-in-the-pan device I’d managed to wrangle as part of a pilot program. I imagined they’d both become virtuosos at digital culture, social media, online research. They’d create formidable, indomitable avatars with vast powers and an absolute immunity to scams, trolls, and disinformation. Their avatars, one day, would heroically match wits with J.K. Rowling and Soledad O’Brien, or whatever luminaries would dominate Twitter in the future.
One thing I couldn’t imagine was that one of them would reject the internet entirely.
Apple has begun pushing iOS 13 and watchOS 6 to supported iPhones and Apple Watches. Both updates bring substantial changes—especially iOS 13—and mark the beginning of a new annual update cycle.
While it may take some time, most users should see iOS 13 become available in the Settings apps on their iPhones or iPod touches by the end of the day today. The watchOS update will pop up in the Watch app on iPhones that are connected to an Apple Watch.
We’ve been able to observe this divergence starting in iOS 9 with Split View multitasking and Apple Pencil, and the transition continued with iOS 11 and its drag and drop-infused environment. It was only natural (and well-deserved) for the iPad to begin advancing in a parallel direction to iOS – informed and inspired by it, but also capable of growing on its own and tackling problems that an iPhone doesn’t have to solve.
From this standpoint, there are two sides to iOS 13: on one hand, an underlying tide that raises all platforms, featuring a distillation of themes Apple comes back to on an annual basis; on the other, a fork in the road, opening a new path for the iPad’s next decade. And against this backdrop, a single question looms large:
Can Apple balance both?
In my own experience with iOS 13.0, which was running on the new iPhone 11 and 11 Pro phones, I've run into some minor issues, including apps crashing or freezing, menu items from apps lingering on the page even when I go back to the Home screen, and a stubborn cursor when I’m trying to edit text. Deleting apps is also completely unintuitive in iOS 13: When you long press on an app, it first shows you the option to share the app or rearrange it, before the apps begin to wiggle and display the familiar “X” for deletion.
[...]
It might not be a bad idea to wait for iOS 13.1.
iOS 12 was supposed to represent a new vision for Apple, a solid foundation of stability that would have paved the way for a revolutionary version of its mobile software. But iOS 13 hasn’t lived up to those promises. There are some new privacy and security features that are genuinely interesting and look to continue on the path that Apple started down last year with its promises of more responsible software. But for the most part, it’s a largely minor update that’s more sizzle than steak. When a dark mode is the biggest feature in the update, that’s a pretty lackluster year.
The main focus of the Photos interface is the Photos section, which is now populated by default with a curated selection of your photos. You’ll find a set of tabs that let you choose whether to view Years, Months, Days, or All Photos.
And while professionals using the iPhone to shoot video are probably going to mostly rely on more powerful third-party apps, it’s great that these features are in reach for everybody. Because now, when you do need to flip, rotate, adjust, or re-crop an image, you can do it with all the ease of editing a photo.
Depending on the app, the menu will be different, but apps don’t enter jiggly mode like they used to. But never fear: it’s just that they don’t enter it right away. You can still get to jiggly mode pretty easily, and there are a few different ways to do it.
The reason Apple implemented this is because Bluetooth has enabled companies to sneakily track your location over Bluetooth by using beacons in stores, shopping malls, and even on popular city streets if they’re placed within range of a place you’d walk by.
[...]
Apps that support Google’s Chromecast streaming platform often ask for Bluetooth access as well. While Chromecast streams content over Wi-Fi, the platform has a “guest mode” that makes it convenient for visitors to play videos or audio on your TV without having to know your home network password. But to find nearby Chromecasts for guest mode, these apps use Bluetooth.
Apple has today released iOS 13 for the iPhone, and watchOS 6 for the Apple Watch, and you can see our roundups for an overview of the new features you can start using right now. However, there’s a lot more still to come as Apple is staggering the software update schedule this year.
All games within Apple Arcade are free of in-app advertising and in-app purchases. Apple Arcade titles are also playable offline, meaning that users won't need to worry about busting through their data caps.
Apple says that no game service has ever launched with so many games. Apple Arcade gives players a chance to check out over 100 games from over 35 different gaming studios. Some of the most notable studios include Bossa Studios, Disney, Konami, Lego, Sega, and more.
But Apple Arcade does create an avenue for indie developers to pursue ambitious games that people will actually discover and play. It snaps into existence a business model that rewards ingenuity over compulsion. And it rewards games that are purposefully constructed with iOS devices in mind—rather than a slapdash port over from another platform—making the overall experience of playing those games more coherent. All for fivse bucks a month. Not bad.
Apple Inc. has been renovating its iconic store on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue for almost three years, and when it opens to the public on Friday customers will likely notice new aesthetics, including 20-foot trees, plant walls and skylights that bring daylight into the subterranean space. But the most popular change may well be two new entrances, subtly placed on the north and south side of the store across the street from the Plaza Hotel.
Trees and natural light feature heavily in the updated store.
Cook counted down to the 8am EST opening with fans, then pushed open the large glass doors to let customers inside the refurbished Apple Store. He even threw out high fives as people filed into the store to buy their new handsets and Apple Watches Series 5s.
"Although Apple's cores aren't the biggest, they continue to lead in mobile performance," noted Gwennap earlier this year in The Microprocessor Report. And at the time he wrote that, he was talking about the A12 chip. The A13 performs about 20 percent better.
So the takeaway here is that specs and benchmarks don't take into account Apple's real advantages—tight integration into the device, and the company's development strategy for squeezing more runtime out of its batteries while boosting the performance of key apps.
Do you have an aging iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch that you want to keep using—and keep covered by AppleCare? The good news is that if you previously bought AppleCare+ for your device, you can now extend that coverage indefinitely on a monthly basis when the plan ends.
Happy iPhone day.
~
Thanks for reading.
The Ultra Wide works really great in normal lighting conditions and overall I’m thrilled to have it, but you will feel a difference when you move indoors or shoot into the evening. The images are softer than the Wide, and without Night mode you’ll be tempted (or forced) to switch back to Wide depending on how limited your light is.
[...]
One thing I love about Apple’s approach to Night mode is the strategic balance of solving a technical problem while also caring deeply about artistic expression. When you look at the image above, it’s clear their team didn’t take the let’s-make-night-look-like-day approach, as some of their competitors have. Instead, it feels more like an embrace of what it actually is (night) while asking, “How do we capture the feel of this scene in a beautiful way?”
The first teardown of the iPhone 11 Pro Max is officially out, courtesy of DChannel on YouTube, and it reveals the inner workings of the newest extra-large iPhone. The most interesting part: the 11 Pro Max has a 15.04 watt-hour battery, nearly 25 percent larger than the iPhone XS Max’s 12.06 watt-hour cells — suggesting the size of the battery, and not any software optimization, is likely the main reason for the new device’s greatly improved battery life.
I stood on the sidewalk and snapped a shot across the street, to a parked car and the tree behind it. On my iPhone XS, the scene is unsalvageable, a muddy car next to a lit driveway with a black void behind it, other than the suggestion of a few branches. The Night Mode shot, on the other hand, shows the car and driveway clearly, with the tree behind it in great detail, another tree off to the side, and above it all, a night sky with dozens of visible stars. The difference between the two shots couldn’t be more dramatic. And all I had to do was hold my iPhone steady for three seconds.
With every success the company has had since Steve’s death, there’s always a moment in the midst of my excitement when I think, I wish Steve could be here for this. It’s impossible not to have the conversation with him in my head that I wish I could be having in real life. More than that, I believe that if Steve were still alive, we would have combined our companies, or at least discussed the possibility very seriously.
In the summer of 2011, Steve and Laurene came to our house in L.A. to have dinner with Willow and me. He was in the late stages of cancer by then, terribly thin and in obvious pain. He had very little energy, and his voice was a low rasp. But he wanted to spend an evening with us, in part to toast what we’d done years ago. We sat in our dining room and raised glasses of wine before dinner. “Look what we did,” he said. “We saved two companies.”
All four of us teared up. This was Steve at his warmest and most sincere. He was convinced that Pixar had flourished in ways that it never would have had it not become part of Disney, and that Disney had been reenergized by bringing on Pixar. I couldn’t help but think of those early conversations and how nervous I was to reach out to him. It was only six years before, but it seemed like another lifetime. He’d become so important to me, professionally and personally. As we toasted, I could barely look at Willow. She had known Steve much longer than I had, going way back to 1982, when he was one of the young, brash, brilliant founders of Apple. Now he was gaunt and frail and in the last months of his life, and I knew how much it pained her to see him that way.
Personally, I’ve always bounced back and forth between Apple Maps and Google Maps, but I’ve been impressed by the strides Apple has made, especially in iOS 13. This is the year in which it feels like Apple is finally getting all its fundamentals squared away and started looking at new features.
Happily, you can still upgrade to Catalina without losing access to older apps, thanks to virtualization. All you have to do is run Mojave in a virtual machine to keep your older software functioning. It makes sense to use Mojave, rather than an earlier macOS release, because Mojave will receive security updates longer than older versions of the operating system.
At this writing, Parallels Desktop 15 for Mac is the only Catalina-ready virtualization software. VMware Fusion isn’t yet Catalina-compatible. The open-source VirtualBox is an option, but it’s appropriate only for those with a strong interest in reading forum posts and staying up on the technical issues.
Dowling previously was Apple’s head of corporate public relations for 10 years. During his tenure, the tech giant has dealt with everything from Tim Cook’s first years as CEO after the death of its iconic founder to a bevy of new product rollouts to a fight with the US government over encryption.
According to a memo he sent this week to staff, Dowling wrote, “it’s time.” He added that he plans to take time off and is apparently not moving to another job at another company. Dowling will stay at Apple until the end of October.
[...]
Marketing head Phil Schiller will take over Dowling’s role in the interim, and sources said the company will be considering both internal and external candidates to take over the position.
It seemed like “slofies” could have been a one-off joke when Apple mentioned them during its iPhone event last week, but the company is clearly pleased with the made-up term. On Friday, Apple applied for a US trademark on “Slofie,” potentially giving the company control over the word’s usage.
A few months down the line, I can confidently say that my initial assumptions about this filter were deeply flawed. To the extent that it’s helped me at all, it’s mostly done so in superficial ways that haven’t quite precipitated the sustainable lifestyle changes I’d been hoping for. Devoid of color, my phone is no less functional, but it’s now drab and joyless enough to inspire a second layer of thought every time I mindlessly pick it up and start scrolling through YouTube or Twitter. Occasionally, this flimsy firewall is obtrusive enough to break me out of my conditioned patterns of behavior, but just barely. Overwhelmingly, I still feel like the dog in Pavlov’s experiment, except there’s now an intermediary step between the ringing of the bell that once made me salivate and the arrival of my meal: the sound of fireworks (or, for the purposes of this metaphor, some other stimulus that dogs hate).
In the latest version, Apple (it seems) allowed in-app purchases of audiobooks via credits... except that I can't find my wish list of books to buy.
~
Thanks for reading.
So instead of the screen going totally black, the face dims and shrinks a little bit. This always-on mode only works across certain apps and watch faces to start. It works on all of Apple’s own watch faces; Apple still isn’t open to the idea of third-party app makers owning the face of its smartwatch. It also works in Apple’s exercise app, which means during outdoor runs I could always catch a glimpse of the workout timer and my pace and distance.
Unfortunately, this dimmed display is also hard to see in bright sunlight, something the thin-film transistor LCDs found in some other smartwatches don’t suffer from as much. And with other apps on the watch, like the phone app, always-on mode simply shows the time of day. If you’re using the Watch to make a call, the dimmed face won’t show the length of your call or the red “end call” button.
While improved battery life would almost certainly be a welcomed feature in future updates, Apple’s made a bit of a compromise, offering an always-on watch that lasts the same stated 18 hours as its predecessors. I found I was, indeed, able to get through a day no problem with standard use. My own usage had the product lasting closer to 20 hours without the need to recharge, but even so, the device needs to get charged once a day, regardless — otherwise you’ll almost certainly be out of juice the following day.
I love the always-on screen on the Series 5. Apple’s implementation is better than other smartwatches I’ve used for two reasons: it legitimately doesn’t hurt the battery life as much, and Apple keeps a little color visible in ambient mode.
To me, the always-on display is the Apple Watch’s retina display moment — once you see it, you can’t go back.
My dogs and I have spent the past few days with the iPhone 11 Pro Max, and I think they would agree when I say that it is an excellent camera for humans who enjoy photographing dogs.
That’s because we are now living in the golden age of smartphones, where the gadgets’ improvements each year are far from seismic. Devices that debuted three years ago remain zippy and more than capable. Those with the iPhone 7 from 2016, for example, still have a very good phone with a stellar camera and fast speeds.
Apple said it will use recycled rare earths in its “Taptic Engine,” a part that lets iPhones mimic a physical button click despite being a flat pane of glass. The part is about one-quarter of the rare earth elements inside the iPhone models.
[...]
Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives, said Apple’s use of recycled rare earths was “not related” to trade tensions but could help it maintain a steady supply.
It’s all encrypted to ensure privacy, but we are about to enter a world where Apple devices emit low-power Bluetooth pings in order to better let you find where they are. The Find My app will be a major beneficiary of this tech.
The long press expands upon the Haptic Touch features introduced in last year’s iPhone XR, as well as absorbing the now deprecated 3D Touch hardware-based features first introduced in the iPhone 6s.
So it’s important to understand the attributes of each and how they fit into different lifestyles and use cases. There is quite a bit to digest, so let’s dig in.
With PCalc’s new Shortcuts actions, we can reduce the number of actions from twelve to just four. It’s a fantastic demonstration of the power that iOS and iPadOS 13 add to third-party shortcut actions and the reduction in complexity that can be achieved with even a relatively simple shortcut.
One of the biggest additions in version 3.10 includes integration with Siri Shortcuts. There are four Things actions to use in the Shortcuts app: add to-do, show to-do, show list, and run Things URL.
When the store reopens, a series of skylights flush on the ground of the plaza will be doing much of the heavy lifting for the lighting during the day. Each of those round portholes will be frosted to let the light in, while protecting the privacy of people walking above, with supplemental lighting from silver LED rings. That, in turn, is augmented by 18 (nine on each side of the cube) “sky lenses.” Oriented in two 3×3 configurations, the “sculptural furniture” will also provide seating in the outdoor plaza.
Right now, I am at the 2-year mark of owning my existing iPhone X, and it is in much better condition than all my previous iPhones at their 2-year mark. Some of the problems previously: lousy responsiveness of the home button; blurry photographs for the rear camera; and a headphone jack that required a little jiggering occasionally in order to have sound in the EarPods.
The iPhone X is the most expensive iPhone that I've bought for myself. And, so far, it has proven to worth every additional penny.
(Of course, now that I have jinx it, I expect to drop my iPhone X and have it broken into a million pieces any day now.)
~
My iPhone X is my first -- and last? -- Apple device that have 3D-touch. And I have turned off 3D-touch in the first year because I was sick and tired of having either the camera or the flashlight turned on accidentally.
~
Thanks for reading.
But once you do find the right scene, you see detail and shadow pop and it becomes immediately evident even before you press the shutter that it is making it dramatically brighter. Night Mode works only in 1x and 2x shooting modes because only those cameras have the 100% focus pixels needed to do the detection and mapping that the iPhone 11 needs to make the effect viable.
I have this weird litmus test I put every new phone camera through where I take it on a dark ride, like Winnie the Pooh, to see if I can get any truly sharp usable image. It’s a great test because the black light is usually on, the car is moving and the subject is moving. Up until this point I have succeeded exactly zero times. But the iPhone 11 Pro pulled it off. Not perfect, but pretty incredible all things considered.
In the case of the iPhone 11 Pro and the larger Pro Max, the word “Pro” equates to a nicer build and a more capable camera than the less expensive iPhone 11. The iPhone 11 is a very good phone, but the “Pro” phones are aspirational objects; new glass slabs to load with the productive and creative and high-resolution elements of our lives, and rectangular on-ramps to Apple’s growing subscription services.
There are two main two reasons to go for this year's most extreme iPhone: Either you want that larger OLED display (2,688×1,242 versus 2,436×1,125 for the Pro) or you want that extra hour of battery life.
I wouldn't want to spend this much. But if you really are using your phone as a professional camera and you want to see every pixel, you want the best viewfinder and editing display you can get. And, well, this would be that phone.
Why are the Pro phones lasting so much longer? The screen and processor are more power efficient, but they also have bigger batteries—part of the reason they’re a fraction of an ounce heavier and 0.02 inches thicker.
This is one of the simplest reviews I’ve ever had to write: the iPhone 11 is the phone most people who are upgrading to a new iPhone this year should get. It’s an excellent phone, with one of the best cameras I’ve ever seen on a smartphone and terrific battery life.
But I still think the iPhone 11 is a very good phone, even if it’s not a futuristic one. Its faster processor, camera upgrade, and long-lasting battery will be enough to sway those who have been putting off buying a new phone. And the iPhone 11’s price is a lot more palatable for some people than the cost of an iPhone 11 Pro or even a premium Samsung phablet.
These games alone make Apple Arcade seem like a no-brainer subscription for anyone with an Apple device. It's $5 for the entire family -- the price of many individual mobile games -- it already has a handful of strong titles, and you can easily play across iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and Mac. Apple needs to maintain the stream of quality of games, and could very well raise the price eventually, but for now, Apple Arcade seems like one of the best deals in gaming.
By bundling them into a subscription, Apple sidesteps the individual purchase barrier that it has had a big hand in creating in the first place. While I don’t think it is fully to blame — plenty of other platforms aggressively promote loot box mechanics — a big chunk of the responsibility to fix this distortion does rest on Apple. Apple Arcade is a great stab at that and I hope that the early titles are an indicator of the overall variety and quality that we can expect.
iOS 13’s QuickPath keyboard is surprisingly good for a first effort. In the weeks that I’ve been using the betas, my biggest problem is simply remembering that the feature is there, so accustomed am I to tapping out my messages like someone from the long distant past who still hasn’t seen the series finale of Lost. It’s not error-proof by any means, but what problems I have encountered are outweighed by its convenience in many situations: for one thing, swipe typing when you’re holding your phone one-handed certainly feels a lot easier than tapping.
One of the iPhone 11 Pro's biggest selling points is its triple-camera system, and it's this system that's the star of Apple's latest ad.
In a world where our phones are also video calling devices, multimedia viewers and more, having your iPhone lying flat on your desk isn’t always optimal. That’s where a new “invisible” stand created by Moft X comes into play.
My rule: I never spend more than five minutes writing a work email. And when I manage other people, it’s a rule I ask them to follow, too. Ideally, each email will take 30 seconds to write—then, even if you write 100 emails a day, it’s still only an hour of your day, but five minutes is the max.
I call this rule the five-minute rule, and it’s how I do work email. I also think it’s how you should do work email, so here I’ll give you some suggestions for how to make it happen.
Chatting on the phone provides the bliss of unreviewable, unforwardable, unsearchable speech. If something comes out a little weird, there’s no record of it. (Unless your conversation partner is secretly recording it, in which case you have deeper problems.) If you misunderstand something, there’s no daylong email chain correcting your error. If a conversation has a tense moment, you can’t scroll back up to critique your performance until the heat death of the universe. Snapchat blew up a few years ago because pictures sent between users on the app disappeared 10 seconds after being viewed; talking to someone on the phone has provided the same freedom in verbal form since the days of Alexander Graham Bell.
Smartphones feel terrible to hold to your ear for more than a few minutes, but they make up for poor ergonomic design with one key feature: speakerphone. I often chat on the phone while lying on the couch, iPhone on my stomach, like I’m talking to a friend who’s excused herself to the kitchen to grab a seltzer—or a therapist sitting placidly outside of my field of vision. Afterward, I feel the same contented buzz I got from talking on the phone after school when I was 10, shortly before AOL Instant Messenger swept my generation onto the internet. It’s a feeling that text messages have never given me. (Although, it must be said: Don’t be the person who uses speakerphone in public. You live in a society.)
How might you characterize the conversational style of a digital assistant like Siri? No matter your impression, it stands to reason that striking the wrong tone could dissuade users from engaging with it in the future.
Perhaps that’s why in a paper (“Mirroring to Build Trust in Digital Assistants“) accepted to the Interspeech 2019 conference in Graz, Austria, researchers at Apple investigated a conversational assistant that considered users’ preferred tones and mannerisms in its responses. They found that people’s opinions of the assistant’s likability and trustworthiness improved when it mirrored their degree of chattiness, and that the features necessary to perform the mirroring could be extracted from those people’s speech patterns.
“The Commission contends that essentially all of Apple’s profits from all of its sales outside the Americas must be attributed to two branches in Ireland,” Apple’s lawyer Daniel Beard told the court.
He said the fact the iPhone, the iPad, the App Store, other Apple products and services and key intellectual property rights were developed in the United States, and not in Ireland, showed the flaws in the Commission’s case.
Night Mode looks great! Or, at least, the Night Mode photos taken by reviewers look great. Results may differ when it is me that is behind the camera.
~
Thanks for reading.
Fifth Avenue Version 1.0 was, despite its success, an imperfect retail space. The above-ground cube was beautiful, but the there was often a line at the door, because the staircase and the elevator could take only so many people at a time. That was especially true on, say, a holiday-season Saturday, when the store itself reached capacity. Once you made your way in, you were—despite the light coming down through the glass cube—pretty clearly in a subterranean space. Not awful; just kind of basement-like.
The principal changes, in this renovation, address that dramatically. Most significantly, the floor has been lowered and the roof elevated, adding about 8 feet to the ceiling height. (Most of the clearance was reclaimed from a parking garage below.) The newly raised plaza has been perforated with a grid of round skylights that will bring sunlight down into the store. Eighteen of them, which Apple’s people are calling “sky lenses,” have stainless-steel bezels, mirror-finished, and they’re raised above the plaza, sort of like shiny mushrooms. Chris Brathwaite, senior director for Apple retail and design, tells me that they’re meant to foster “sitting, selfies, and reflection,” which seems extremely likely to pan out.
Formerly the third-party app Workflow, Shortcuts was bought by Apple and integrated with iOS last year—but it was a first step. Shortcuts has had a year to spread its roots throughout the operating system, and in iOS 13 it’s been improved and better integrated—with the promise of even more to come in the very near future.
Shortcuts is now included on every iOS 13 devices—it’s not an add-on you have to download from the App Store. Apple has also begun to integrate disparate automation features of iOS and place them all inside Shortcuts. Siri Shortcuts, very simple app-based automations introduced in iOS 12, now live inside the Shortcuts app. And beginning in iOS 13.1, the simple automations that you create in the Home app will also appear in Shortcuts—and can be modified and enhanced with additional features of the Shortcuts app.
The iPad has a chance to be the machine that acts as our podcast editor, writing machine, teaching machine, gaming machine, etc. The adaptability of the iPad is part of its strength. Apple set a vision with iPadOS 13, and while it’s a significant first step toward expanding the capabilities of the iPad, the excitement lies on what is to come with this new vision.
At its event last week, Apple previewed a new version of Filmic Pro running on the iPhone 11 Pro. It was a compelling demo with the app able to record from multiple cameras simultaneously, like recording the front and back camera together, or filming using the new ultra-wide and standard wide cameras for additional coverage.
However, the good news is that simultaneous multi-cam sessions are not only available on the iPhone 11. The feature is also supported by the iPhone XS, iPhone XR, and the 2018 iPad Pro.
Wireless charging stands hold your iPhone up so you can easily see the display while the handset is getting power. Belkin has a model that improves on the whole concept: it can charge your device when it’s propped up in either portrait or landscape mode.
If all goes to plan for Apple, this week will be all about the iPhone 11. But Friday’s product launch will come just after fresh headlines about news it would rather people forget — allegations that it dodged taxes and took €13bn of illegal state aid from Ireland in exchange for creating jobs.
[...]
A ruling is expected by the end of next year. But whatever the outcome, the losing party is set to appeal. After that, an appeal is likely to go through the European Court of Justice where the case is expected to take three to four years to reach a conclusion.
I sure hope the new iPadOS Safari will make my life easier with AWS Web Console.
And I sure hope the new Shortcuts app will inspire app developers to support better automation in iOS.
~
Thanks for reading.
Hailee Steinfeld, the actor and pop singer who stars in and executive produces the Apple TV+ half-hour Dickinson, says her music career will play a significant role in the show’s sensibility and marketing appeal.
At the show’s first screening at the Tribeca TV Festival on Saturday — the first time any Apple streaming series has been shown to the public — Steinfeld said she has recorded a new song, “Afterlife.” It will be released September 19, ahead of the launch of Apple TV+ on November 1.
Apple TV+ premiered its first show at the Tribeca TV Festival on Saturday, flaunting feminist snark, lavish period costumes and a star-studded cast in “Dickinson,” a series that sheds a modern light on the life of an iconic American poet.
[...]
“Dickinson” cast members said they were grateful Apple seemed to spare no expense on period costumes and sets.
"How many of the tens (hundreds?) of millions of people who... buy...will say no to a short list of shows by A-list talent?"
On a historical basis, that would work out to about 260 million purchasers a year and if everyone signed up, Apple TV + would easily have way more than Netflix's 150 million subscribers.
If you are still emailing files to people nearby, or, God forbid, are using a USB thumb drive to transfer a few photos, stop. Because if you're on an iPhone, iPad or Mac you can use AirDrop instead. It's fast, secure and dead easy to set up. I'm going to walk you through how to use AirDrop to wirelessly transfer files, photos and a whole lot more with your Apple devices.
Depending on which model or type of Apple Watch you own and where and how you'd like to use it, there are a variety of activities you can perform, from listening to music and tracking your workouts to monitoring your heart rate and viewing your photos. And like the iPhone and iPad, the Apple Watch includes an array of settings and options you can tweak to coax it to work and act the way you want.
Building, monitoring, and improving machine learning systems is no walk in the park, no matter the circumstances. Data scientists and engineers have to monitor fine-grained quality and diagnose errors in sophisticated apps, not to mention field contradictory or incomplete corpora. To ease the development burden somewhat, Apple developed Overton, a framework intended to automate AI system lifecycles by providing a set of novel high-level abstractions. Given the query “How tall is the president of the United States,” for example, Overton generates a model capable of supplying an answer. (It only supports text processing currently, but Apple is prototyping image, video, and multimodal apps.)
Apple researchers say that Overton has been used in production to support “multiple applications” in both near-real-time and back-of-house processing, and in that time, Overton-based apps have answered “billions” of queries in multiple languages and processed “trillions” of records. “[The] vision is to shift developers to … higher-level tasks instead of lower-level machine learning tasks. [E]ngineers can build deep-learning-based applications without writing any code,” wrote the coauthors of a research paper describing Overton. “Overton [can] automate many of the traditional modeling choices, including deep learning architecture … and [it allows engineer] … to build, maintain, and monitor their application by manipulating data files.”
"For smartphones, while Apple is quite vertically integrated, the majority of hardware innovation comes from partners such as Sony for cameras, Samsung and LG for displays, Western Digital or SK Hynix for memory or Qualcomm for cellular tech, which has anyways been available to most of the rivals," he says. "So the only room left to innovate and differentiate is in iOS, processors and user experience, which is where Apple has been differentiating, but rivals have caught up, and even surpassed in that as well."
"This, of course, is one reason why Apple is focusing on privacy as a key differentiator, a major advantage compared to the open Android camp," Shah says. "Apple is great at integrating technologies and marketing it much better than rivals, and thus actually not an innovator. But with Watch, Apple has been acquiring companies to scale the innovation on wrist and differentiate with core features making the watch a meaningful health sensor."
There are days when I feel hunger, but I simply don't find the task of eating food appealing. Too much deciding; too much work. There are days when I still feel hunger after all my regular meals with regular potions. Too much food; too much missing.
And then: there are days like today when I don't know what the heck I am feeling.
~
Thanks for reading.
We failed to anticipate how checking your watch in the middle of a conversation would become just as rude as checking your phone, even and especially when it’s not intended to signal anything other than a knee jerk interest in what time it happens to be at that moment. So Apple found itself in the position of having to engineer a solution to a problem it likely didn’t predict it would be responsible for creating when it launched its first smartwatch four years ago.
Of course, nobody is losing a good friend or their job over raising their Apple Watch to check the time. It’s not the end of the world if you have to explain to someone that you’re hopelessly addicted to the screen in your pocket and on your wrist — that it’s not them, really, it’s you. But it’s often the case that technology embeds itself into our lives in unforeseen ways. What may once have seemed like a benign or perhaps even positive quality — a watch display that goes black when you lower your wrist — has become decidedly less so over the years.
According to sources familiar with the deal, Bad Robot's five-year pact announced Thursday is worth at least $250 million and possibly much more thanks to various financial incentives. It will see Abrams and company develop and produce new film, TV, video game and digital projects for WarnerMedia's various divisions, which include Warner Bros., HBO and the upcoming HBO Max streaming service. Warners has been Abrams' television home since 2006, and the new partnership brings Bad Robot’s film output, which was through Paramount, under the same roof for the first time.
According to sources, the ability to sell product to other outlets — i.e. setting up one of his three shows at Apple via Warner Bros. TV — was paramount to Bad Robot signing anywhere. It also is among the reasons why Bad Robot left millions of dollars on the table and walked away from what could have been a record-setting blockbuster deal with Apple.
We’ve seen promotion reels and trailers for what look like good TV shows, but absolutely nothing that’s specific to Apple. They’re not solving a problem or changing anything about the TV experience or product. Apple just paid a bunch of LA people to do LA stuff, and put the result in an app. The shows might all be great, but any of them could be on Netflix, Amazon or HBO. Apple is using this to drive purchase and retention of iPhones, with free access for a year, and it may well be effective at that, but it’s no more ‘Appley’ than free pizza for a year.
Apple had originally said that the titanium Apple Watch would be 45% lighter. At the same time, it said that titanium Apple Watch would weigh as much as the Stainless Steel —with neither specification right. Apple has since updated the information with the correct weights, and has stricken percentages from marketing materials online.
The iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro officially went up for pre-order yesterday ahead of their September 20th launch day. Over the last 24 hours, supply of certain iPhone models has started to dwindle, but plenty of options still remain for day one delivery.
The first video features random objects, food, and water being hurled at the iPhone 11 Pro to demonstrate the device's increased durability. [...] The second video highlights the new triple-lens camera system with 12-megapixel wide, ultra wide, and telephoto lenses.
Congress has asked Apple along with Amazon, Facebook, and Alphabet for emails and other communications between executives as it continues its antitrust investigation into the major tech companies. In Apple’s case, Congress wants to look over emails and more as evidence relating to the company removing third-party Screen Time apps, its App Store algorithm, and potential efforts to Sherlock apps.
Apple Stores, which now number 508 across 22 countries, broke every rule in electronics retailing on its way to becoming a cultural icon. Instead of the food court, it was a meet-up spot for friends before window-shopping at Hot Topic or Claire’s. People spent hours in its sleek stores hovering over the rows of Mac laptops playing with the filters on Photo Booth and uploading the best photos to Myspace. It felt like stealing when an Apple Store employee would swipe your credit card on an iPhone instead of waiting in line at a register. When they’d operate on your glitchy computer and hand it back to you shiny and new, the people at the Genius Bar seemed like actual geniuses. It was an experience that other computer retailers like Dell and Microsoft tried to imitate but couldn’t. It was the future — and then the future caught up.
Now nearly 20 years later, and a week away from the grand reopening of Apple’s Fifth Avenue flagship store in New York, the company faces the same challenge with its stores as it does with its products — how to keep pace once its cutting-edge ideas have become standard.
Disney is launching streaming video service Disney+ this on November 12, which will compete with Apple's Apple TV+ service, which will become available on November 1.
He resigned on September 10, the day that Apple announced the price and release date for its streaming service. The two streaming services will increasingly come into conflict in the future as both compete for original content.
Apple disputed the negative call by Goldman Sachs on Friday, which hit the stock, taking issue with the firm's negative characterization on how Apple would account for its new TV+ service.
The announcement is a departure from its previous study, which focused on whether the Apple Watch could work as a screening tool for irregular heart beats, which is known as atrial fibrillation. The study was criticized for failing to assess how often the Apple Watch failed to detect atrial fibrillation or how often it falsely detected these heart abnormalities. As a result, there was concern that the Apple Watch might send people to the doctor unnecessarily, and worse, potentially harm their health if a doctor used false positive data to put a patient on heart medication they didn’t need.
But in this new set of studies, Apple is stepping back from framing the Watch as a medical device with a powerful algorithm that can accurately detect heart abnormalities. Instead, the Watch will act as a data collector, leaving the experts to analyze what the data means. The shift potentially allows Apple to occupy more of the spotlight and maybe court less controversy. Doctors and researchers working on the projects are excited because the studies have the potential to give them insight into patient health they currently just don’t have.
In the latest iOS and watchOS there are a whole host of features which you can use to keep on top of your health, including several things new in watchOS 6 and iOS 13. And on Tuesday, Apple announced a range of new health initiatives and studies to keep their focus dialled in for the next few years.
Siri in iOS 13 comes with a handful of changes, all of which are in line with the types of iteration we’re used to seeing for Apple’s intelligent assistant. Siri now offers suggested actions in more places and ways than before, its voice continues becoming more human, and perhaps this year’s biggest change is a new SiriKit domain for media, which should enable – after the necessary work by third-party developers – audio apps like Spotify, Overcast, and Audible to be controlled by voice the way Apple’s native Music, Podcasts, and Books apps can be.
But whatever the reason, this marks the first time iPhone battery life jumped so much in one generation. Usually, the iPhone sacrifices any excess battery life to get thinner or lighter. And yet the iPhones 11 Pro come in heavier and a hair thicker than their iPhone XS predecessors. What’s going on? Has Jony Ive’s reign finally ended?
Like the addition of cellular connectivity (added in 2017) and support for entirely standalone apps (added this year with watchOS 6), an always-on watch face has always seemed like a feature that had to come to the Apple Watch eventually. These are all features that seemed inevitable, and necessary, for the product to fulfill its potential.
And here we are. Thanks to some clever redesigned display technology and a bunch of other upgrades, the Apple Watch Series 5 will show the current time on its face, no jiggling required.
The video spends nearly two minutes providing quick glimpses at a lot of Arcade titles, while lingering for extended periods over a handful of titles that haven’t been seen much before, such as Earth Night, Hot Lava, Skate City, and more.
Apple has tweaked the pricing of its 11 and 12.9-inch 1TB iPad Pro models, dropping the cost by $200 in the United States.
Apple explains that when a user’s subscription renewal fails, it will now attempt to collect payment from the user, but allow them to continue accessing the service during that process.
“As we got closer to implementation we spent more time with developers, analytics companies and advertising companies,” said Schiller. “Some of them are really forward thinking and have good ideas and are trying to be leaders in this space too.”
With their feedback, Schiller said, they’ve updated the guidelines to allow them to be more applicable to a broader number of scenarios. The goal, he said, was to make the guidelines easy enough for developers to adopt while being supportive of sensible policies that parents could buy into. These additional guidelines, especially around the Kids app category, says Schiller, outline scenarios that may not be addressed by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) or GDPR regulations.
One of the things iOS has been sorely lacking for a decade is the ability for users to install custom fonts. Apple has put it off on the grounds that custom fonts open security and privacy holes. Proving Apple’s point, Google-owned Crashlytics is already abusing the feature to track users by installing a font with a custom identifier embedded.
While the Apple TV+ bundle is not entirely analogous—you will have to sign up for the free year, while these other services are used without any intervention—it seems likely to me that Apple will pull a little revenue out of the hardware sales figures and toss it into the Services pile every time someone signs up for a free year of Apple TV+.
Upgrading is not my chosen path, but one I will accept. I’ll use my SE as long as I can. I just hope Apple hears the cries of us mini-phoners and, when it does come time for my surrender, against all odds, releases a new small phone.
Two surprise heroes of Wi-Fi were the US government (yes, the government helped!) and Apple. Not only was the Federal Communications Commission proactive in creating the rules that enabled Wi-Fi to exist in the first place, they changed the rules to allow new technologies to be developed, and they added frequency bands that made way for higher speeds. Apple was the first vendor to push the envelope with new Wi-Fi technology, not once, not twice, but at least three times. In Apple’s typical brand-forward fashion, when the iBook was introduced in 1999 as the first laptop with built-in Wi-Fi, they called it AirPort. Apple didn’t deign to call it Wi-Fi for years.
Some folks will look at that list and say the iPhones 11 Pro aren’t really “pro”. I look at that list and say the regular iPhone 11 is almost just as “pro” at significantly lower prices. This is a very different dynamic between pro and non-pro models compared to MacBooks, Mac desktops, and iPads, where the pro models have very obvious performance differences. The iPhone is just a different product.
I honestly think the thing I’m most excited about is the new “Quick Take” feature that allows you to simply hold down the shutter software button in picture mode to take a video. As a new parent, I will use this non-stop. It drives me batty to have to swipe between the modes when speed is of the utmost importance.
The slides accompanying the announcement of the feature pretty much nailed all the situations in which having an always-on display would be preferable to the current state of affairs. And it turns out we were waiting for a redesigned Apple Watch display that could seriously save power by doing things like ratchet down to a single update per second and dynamically adjust brightness. Apple also appears to have adjusted watch faces to reduce motion when in an inactive state—for example, it seems that the second hand just disappears when you’re in this mode, which makes sense.
This feature might be my favorite item in the entire event. It’s a major upgrade in Apple Watch functionality. And to think, I didn’t see why Apple needed to bother this year. I guess the rumor mill failed us on this one, but what a delightful surprise.
UWB is faster and more accurate than what you’re used to, able to locate objects with uncanny accuracy in a relatively large space. In its iPhone marketing materials, Apple refers to it as “GPS at the scale of your living room.” So the two questions to ask next are: Why haven’t you seen it before? And what exactly is it going to do?
Industry insiders caution that it could take time for Apple to establish itself amid an increasingly competitive environment where established entertainment companies like WarnerMedia, Disney and NBCUniversal are entering the direct-to-consumer space. "In this streaming era, it takes a long time for audiences to build," notes a veteran agent, "and in the history of television, it's rare that a show comes out of the box huge."
If WarnerMedia, Netflix, and Hulu are trying to replicate an entire cable bundle — lots of reruns, always something to watch — Apple TV Plus is trying to replicate what made HBO special: fewer shows but a clear style that you can’t get anywhere else.
The backlash comes from people who say they suffer from an obscure and perplexing condition called “trypophobia” — a fear of clusters of small holes like those found in shoe treads, honeycombs and lotus seed pods. Essex University Professor Geoff Cole, a self-diagnosed trypophobe and researcher in the United Kingdom who studies the condition calls it “the most common phobia you have never heard of.”
The phobia isn’t recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which psychologists and psychiatrists use to diagnose patients. But self-described sufferers and some researchers claim the images can evoke a strong emotional response and induce itching, goose bumps, and even nausea and vomiting.
This sounds like customers can choose to continue the monthly AppleCare+ coverage as long as they’d like or until Apple can’t service the device anymore.
White ceramic models come with a soft white Sport Band with a ceramic pin, titanium models come with a light gray Sport Band, and space black titanium models come with a dark gray Sport Band. This is in addition to whichever band a customer chooses for the Apple Watch during the purchase process.
Apple Card’s rewards program, Daily Cash, is expanding today with the addition of Walgreens. The retailer joins Uber and Uber Eats to become the latest merchant to offer 3% Daily Cash to Apple Card customers who use Apple Pay at checkout. This includes purchases made in both Walgreens and Duane Reade retail stores, as well as on the web at walgreens.com, and in the Walgreens mobile app.
Apple didn’t talk about the HomePod on stage but it has quietly updated the product pages with some announcements.
Magnus is part of a wave of smartphone apps trying to catalog the physical world as a way of providing instantaneous information about songs or clothes or plants or paintings. First came Shazam, an app that allows users to record a few seconds of a song and instantly identifies it. Shazam’s wild success — it boasts more than a billion downloads and 20 million uses daily, and was purchased by Apple for a reported $400 million last year — has spawned endless imitations. There is Shazam for plants or Shazam for clothes and now, Shazam, for art.
The art-oriented apps harness image recognition technology, each with a particular twist. Magnus has built a database of more than 10 million images of art, mostly crowdsourced, and aims to help prospective art buyers navigate the notoriously information-lite arena of galleries and fairs.
Until now, there has been little evidence on how individual workers adjust when a specific skill declines. But a new working paper from economists John J. Horton, an assistant professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, and Prasanna Tambe, an associate professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, suggests the labor market has the capacity for great resilience.
Their research shows that while demand for Flash skills declined after Jobs’s announcement, there was very little impact on Flash specialists in terms of wages or competition for job openings, even when hours were reduced. There was also no evidence that employers were flooded with applications from out-of-work Flash programmers.
So why is Apple embracing its past now? Because as Pressman points out, Apple is thinking about its iPhones as accessories, not technologies. And color is currently on trend—perhaps no surprise for a time when many of us need something to feel better about the world.
But Apple can’t actually be comparing its iPad to a desktop PC, right? No, if you dig down into the disclaimer that Apple buries in its press release, it clarifies, “when compared to the top-selling Windows PC laptop in the U.S. for the first half of 2019.”
Which laptop that is, Apple doesn’t say. PCWorld reached out to Apple to ask about the specific model used in its comparison, but has not heard back. That again leaves us guessing.
If the watchOS allows third-party watch faces, Apple will probably not be able to keep its secret and surprise everybody with the always-on feature.
~
This is how Apple introduced the iPhone Pro's water-resistant feature on the apple.com website: Splashes? Pffft.
This is how Apple introduced the same feature on the Singapore version: Splashes? Can.
I'm not sure how I like this.
~
Thanks for reading.
The most touted new feature is the inclusion of that new lens. It brings the rear-facing camera count from one to two when comparing the XR and the 11, and from two to three when comparing the XS and the 11 Pro. I tried it on all three phones, and found it worked exactly as advertised. Good, old-fashioned 1x zoom is selected by default on all phones. But on all three, you can switch to 0.5x zoom, which is really handy for taking close-up photos of anything from pets to well, iPhones on the Apple showroom floor. I didn't notice any change in quality from one zoom level to the other.
And of course, the 11 Pro can also do 2x optical zoom. Since there are three options on the Pro models and just two on the 11, the interface is a little different, which you can see in the photos above. On the Pro, you see all three selection options and tap the one you want. On the 11, you just see an indicator for the currently selected zoom level and tap that to swap back and forth.
One of the understated components of Apple’s iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro is the new U1 chip. It didn’t get a prominent callout onstage at today’s announcement event, but it will underpin what Apple says are “amazing new capabilities” coming to iOS devices in the future, including a more accurate, directional version of AirDrop coming with iOS 13.
For the first time since the original iPhone was released back in 2007, Apple is finally upgrading the included wall plug and cable that comes in the box: the newly announced iPhone 11 Pro will — at long last — come with a fast-charging 18W USB-C charger and a USB-C to Lightning cable in the box.
Haptic Touch does many of the same things that 3D Touch does so new iPhone users will not be missing out on much functionality, but it's not quite the same as the 3D Touch feature.
All of that said, the spread of fiber networks and other connections that approach gigabit speeds means that Wi-Fi 6 will probably be a whole lot more relevant to a whole lot more people within the next year or so. And, now that the iPhone is on board, you can expect more devices to follow suit, too. Apple is still a market mover.
Tired of having to raise your wrist or tap the screen of your Apple Watch just to see what time it is? With the new Apple Watch Series 5, introduced today at Apple’s special event in Cupertino, that will no longer be necessary, thanks to the “innovative” Always-On Retina display. (Of course, “always-on” has been a feature of every other watch ever.) Other new features include a built-in compass and international emergency calling, and Apple has brought back ceramic cases and introduced new titanium cases. Apart from these new features and case materials, the Apple Watch Series 5 builds on the Series 4’s feature set, including ECG monitoring and fall detection.
Apple Stores and Apple.com will soon have a new Apple Watch buying experience for customers. The all-new Apple Watch Studio will allow customers to pair watch models and bands separately at purchase for the first time.
The tentpole feature that dominates the Apple Watch series 5 story, though, is something that we've already seen in numerous other wearables: it has an always-on display. Apple is definitely playing catch-up here, but the implementation does seem neat. The Watch's screen brightness lowers when you're not looking at it, but the time and other stuff is still legible. When you tap it or raise it (the same action that turned on the screen to begin with in prior models), the screen brightness raises for easier readability.
Apple announced three new health studies Tuesday that will address issues of hearing, heart health, and women's health as it relates to menstrual cycles and reproduction.
Naturally, the new iPad will come with Apple's forthcoming iPadOS update, which will give the device a more robust multitasking system. It'll be able to connect to thumb drives and SD cards, too, and it will work with Apple's Pencil stylus and Smart Keyboard attachment.
After Apple announced its seventh generation iPad today with a 10.2-inch screen, Smart Connector, and more, Logitech has unveiled three folio keyboard cases to offer protection and a great typing experience, with one designed specifically for schools.
The service will be price of $4.99 per month for a family subscription serving up to six people, and a one-month free trial will be available. That subscription provides access to over 100 games across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV, Apple says, all of which feature no ads or in-app purchases and are all playable offline with a single subscription. New games will be added to the selection monthly, and Apple said none of them will be available on other mobile platforms or subscription services.
The paid subscription service will launch in over 100 countries on November 1, at a price of $4.99/month; a 7-day free trial period will be available to all users. Additionally, Apple is offering an entire year of free Apple TV+ service with the purchase of any iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, or iPod touch from today on.
iOS 13 will hit iPhones and watchOS 6 will reach Apple Watches on September 19. iPadOS will ship a few days later on September 30. macOS Catalina is still due at an as-yet unspecified date in October.
Ahead of the upcoming public releases of iOS 13 on September 19th, Apple has told developers via its developer website that App Store submissions are open.
The iPhone fundamentally changed the camera industry and the medium itself, transforming anyone with a smartphone in their pocket into a photographer, a videographer, a documentarian of everyday life and historical events in the making. It sounds frivolous, but each new iteration impacts the photography we see on our feeds, and by extension, how we view the world. Judging by these features, the world of food we observe on our phones is going to be a little better lit, and more easily wider, going forward.
Apple has significantly improved the Apple Watch in both Series 4 and, now, Series 5, that I wonder: why would anyone want to buy the older (and, yes, cheaper) Series 3?
~
I am disappointed, and a little surprised, to find the color blue missing from the iPhone 11 lineup. Since the bondi-blue iMac, it seems that blue has always been a color offered by Apple in any generation of multi-color products: iMac (even during the Flower Power era, there's Blue Dalmation), iBook, iPod (mini, nano, touch), and iPhone (5c, XR). (That is, I'm excluding all the black/white/gold/product-red only stuff.)
~
Will Slofie replace Boomerang?
~
Thanks for reading.
The problem with making WebKit mandatory, according to security researchers, is that Apple's browser engine is in some respects less secure than Chrome's. Amy Burnett, a founder of security firm Ret2 who leads trainings in both Chrome and WebKit exploitation, says that it's not clear which of the two browsers has the most exploitable bugs. But she argues that Chrome's bugs are fixed faster, which she credits in part to Google's internal efforts to find and eliminate security flaws in its own code, often through automated techniques like fuzzing.
[...]
More fundamentally, iMessage has innate privileges in iOS that other messaging apps are denied. In fact, non-Apple apps are cordoned off from the rest of the operating system by rigorous sandboxes. That means that if a third-party app like WhatsApp is compromised, for instance, a hacker still has to break through its sandbox with another, distinct technique to gain deeper control of the device. But Project Zero's Silvanovich noted in her writeup of the iMessage flaws that some of iMessage's vulnerable components are integrated with SpringBoard, iOS's program for managing a device's home screen, which Silvanovich writes has no sandbox at all.
A Reddit user recently posted an email exchange he had with Apple VP of software Craig Federighi asking for a scheduled iMessage feature for iPhone and iPad. Federighi revealed that Apple has actually considered and is still considering the feature. However, there are a couple of issues with how scheduled iMessages are received that has caused Apple to hold back on the idea for now.
The headline features of version 15 are the adoption of Apple’s Metal API and support for Microsoft DirectX 11. Version 15 users can run several CAD apps plus PC game titles as new options for Mac. Now, Autodesk 3ds Max 2020, Lumion, ArcGIS Pro, Master Series, FIFA 19, Age of Empires, Fallout 4 and more can all run through Parallels. I know for people who use Autodesk products, they have often preferred the PC versions over the native Mac ones due to various optimizations. My sister-in-law is a landscape architect, and she prefers to use the PC versions on low spec hardware over the Mac version on a souped-up iMac. With the continued enhancements to Parallels, she could easily run the PC version on top of macOS without much slowdown.
Microsoft today has officially unveiled an all-new version of its To Do application as it continues to integrate features of the Wunderlist platform it acquired in 2015. The company touts that the new To Do application is a major upgrade, with a new design, deeper integration with other platforms, and more.