The main reason Apple doesn’t allow third-party watch faces is battery life. On the Apple Watch Series 5 and Series 6, the watch face is displayed almost all the time. It’s vital the code driving the watch face consume as little power as possible. Apple engineers go to great lengths to ensure the watch face code is power-efficient.
These efforts go well beyond simple tricks like hiding the second hand when the face dims since animation takes more power than a static display. Apple engineers have intimate knowledge of how watchOS displays graphics and how the Apple Watch’s GPU works, and for better or worse, this information is proprietary. They know which graphics techniques use the least power. Their animation techniques are the most energy-efficient possible. They have access to private graphics APIs that aren’t available to third-party developers. And they have internal testing and measurement tools that the company doesn’t provide to third-party developers.
“If you’re just providing information, they’re not regulating that,” says Matt Grennan, assistant professor of health care management in the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Digital health products are so ubiquitous, and so many new ones enter the market every year, that it’d be hard for the FDA to review all of them. “They have to think about how they can allocate their own resources,” Grennan says.
The agency does step in, though, when companies want to use apps to influence the medical care someone receives. The EKG feature falls under that category.
The best gets better and the notion of competition becomes more comical. The amount of “better” will vary depending on what is important to you, but in general, it’s not a massive upgrade over the Series 5 (which, again, is now basically the SE). But it is surprisingly noticeably faster. And it’s less surprisingly noticeably bluer. Which I love.
The Apple Watch SE is almost a resounding success, but is let down by one cut corner too many.
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But the lack of an always-on screen is a deal-killer for me. From glancing at the time and date to timing exercises, not having the screen on all the time is really irritating. It’s also a feature practically every other smartwatch at this price or less has.
With Apple's consent, Taiwan's Wistron sold its iPhone-assembly factory in the Chinese city of Kunshan this summer to local rival Luxshare Precision Industry. The handover was significant: It paved the way for the Chinese supplier to move up the Apple supply chain, fueling hopes that it could become China's equivalent of the Taiwanese Foxconn, a giant of tech manufacturing. China's Lens Technology also bought iPhone casing factories from Taiwan's Catcher Technology, a longtime Apple metal casing provider, in the city of Taizhou in August.
"Apple has always been cultivating Chinese suppliers. The rationale behind this used to be that it gave Apple more price bargaining power against the existing suppliers, but now it has also become a strategy to diversify geopolitical risks," said an executive-level source familiar with Apple's thinking.
Apple recently expanded its “Look Around” feature in Apple Maps to Phoenix, Arizona, providing 3D street-level imagery that’s similar to Google’s Street View.
In the UK, Health Records is being adopted by Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Milton Keynes University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. In Canada, Women’s College Hospital, St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton, and Mackenzie Health are adding the feature.
Developer Joe Hribar has managed to work around Apple’s API limitations as well as could be hoped, and deliver new widgets that actually provide more functionality than before.
With Magnets, you and your friends can share photos with each other and make them show up right on your iOS home screens.
The fast-paced, fun word game challenges users to spell all the words you can in two minutes and uses a lexicon of words Kocienda built to allow for the inclusion of proper names.
Developers will now be able to set up and manage TestFlight apps right on their iPhone and iPad through the App Store Connect app.
The move represents Apple's growing commitment to its original programming. The company has long championed creators' rights, but now that it's producing its own content for Apple TV+, it is doubling down on efforts to protect original content.
A conglomeration of French and European publishers’ organisations, led by the Alliance de la Presse d’Information Générale (APIG) – the organization that had been negotiating with Google – has written to Apple’s Tim Cook, highlighting their concerns over the company’s terms of service in the App store.
The Hong Kong database shows that Apple filed for the trademark 'iPhone for Life' in early April 2020.
Blue is my favorite color. All my iPods were blue. If I were to buy an Apple Watch today, I will buy the blue-colored one. (I'm not planning to buy an Apple Watch.)
I'm not planning to buy a new iPhone next week either. But, if I do, I wish there is a good blue-colored option. Just saying.
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Cruises-to-nowhere are resuming next month here in Singapore. Maybe I should figure out how to be less anxious just stepping out of my own home.
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Thanks for reading.