So when you see that the new iPhone 12 and 12 Pro have 6.1-inch displays, 12 years of iPhone experience are going to make you think these are iPhone XR/11-sized devices. They’re not. In hand, in pocket, and to the eye, they feel and look like iPhone X/XS/11 Pro-sized devices. Display size is no longer a proximate metric for relative iPhone device size.
The premiere accessory is the MagSafe charger, a $39 puck that snicks onto the back of the phone with a satisfying clap and then wirelessly charges it. [...] In my testing, I would get around 40 percent charge in an hour. That’s slower than the fastest wireless charging systems out there and much slower than a cable, but it’s also easy and convenient.
Apple’s puck is thin and light and attaches firmly enough that you can pick up the phone and use it without it getting disconnected.
The iPhone 12 Pro is a solid camera, and thanks to a bunch of new digital tech I found it to be slightly stronger than the already great iPhone 11 Pro — but if you are serious about photography with your iPhone, wait for the iPhone 12 Pro Max. It looks to be the most significant jump in iPhone camera hardware we’ve experienced in years, and it’s only three weeks away.
All in all, the iPhone 12 Pro camera remains one of the most powerful, capable smartphone cameras on the market right now. The problem is that the iPhone 12 Pro Max camera is coming out in less than a month. If you are the sort of person who buys a new phone for the camera, I would definitely wait.
This middle child's best feature, and I can't believe I'm about to say this, is lidar. [...] I could care less about AR in a phone, but the scanner does a lot to improve the camera system on the iPhone 12 Pro. (The Pro Max will also have a lidar scanner.) Here, it enables faster autofocus and the ability to capture portrait photos in Night mode. The latter has been my favorite camera feature to test. I no longer encounter that "Not enough light" message when taking a Portrait mode photo in low light. It doesn't work perfectly every single time, but the results are often well detailed and colorful, with a pleasant "bokeh" blur effect around the subject. If you use Portrait mode extensively, as I do, this is the upgrade you've been waiting for.
The areas where the iPhone 12’s cameras seemed most improved were in low light or at night. And since many of the iPhone’s camera advancements this year are computational improvements, that means Apple will continue to release software that will make the cameras better.
I started this iPhone review in the most peculiar way: by opening a map to find out where I could test it.
That’s because Apple’s newest iPhones, for the first time, work with 5G, the ultrafast fifth-generation wireless networks that will theoretically let people download a movie to their devices in seconds. The problem? The superspeedy 5G networks have not been rolled out everywhere.
A lot of this is just 5G growing pains. The carriers and Apple are betting that as the networks expand, and phones get into more hands, we’ll see apps and services we can’t yet imagine—just as 4G enabled the likes of Uber and Instagram.
If and when that happens, iPhone 12 owners will be ready. In the meantime, they’ll have a pretty great iPhone.
Overall, the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro battery life is a bummer over 5G, at least when surfing the web. So you may want to manually switch to 4G in some cases to save extra juice.
The iPhone 12 will take into a consideration a number of factors to figure out the best network. For instance, if the screen is off, chances are you're streaming music or running apps like e-mail in the background and won't need 5G.
The phone, however, will get even more granular and look at how the content is delivered over the network. For instance, with video streaming, the phone will be smart enough to know if the quality of movie being delivered over the network would require 4G or 5G. It'll even get specific enough to figure out which band of spectrum within 5G would be appropriate, whether it's that super-fast millimeter wave variety or the slower low-band version.
For me, one of the biggest reasons to use an iPad instead of another computer is that it’s just a nicer experience. You can pad around your house with it, attach or detach a keyboard, and almost never really have to worry about it crashing or slowing down. Apple has allowed iPadOS to grow a little more complicated in recent years, but it’s still a more chill computing environment than the Mac, Windows 10, or Chrome OS.
And the iPad Air epitomizes that niceness with its new design. Chances are if you’re buying an iPad, you’re going to keep it for many years, and so spending more on a nicer product is going to pay off more in the long run than it would for, say, a phone that might only last you two or three.
The iPad Air is meant to fill a happy middle ground between the bargain-priced iPad and the high-end models. If you want to use the nicer Apple Pencil and the Magic Keyboard, you don’t need to buy an iPad Pro anymore, and that’s a good thing.
On one hand, this iPad clearly resembles the 11” iPad Pro but lacks some of its more advanced features and options to hit a lower price point; on the other, because most iPad users aren’t going to require those extra niceties, the iPad Air feels like an ideal mix of mainstream and pro – a distillation of what makes the modern iPad Pro experience great, but offered in a more affordable package that covers the essentials, from support for the second-generation Apple Pencil and Magic Keyboard to the Liquid Retina Display and gesture-based multitasking. And the iPad Air does all this while looking forward at the future of iPad as a computer for everyone, with new technologies such as the A14 Bionic chip and Touch ID embedded in the top button that I would like to see find their way to more iPad models soon.
After skipping the initial release of iOS 14, Apple has just released HomePod Software 14.1 to the public with new features and improvements, including enhancements to Siri, Intercom, HomePod mini support, and more.
It addresses a major problem that caused some emails to be sent from the wrong alias, a fix that Mail app users will be happy to see. It also fixes an issue that could cause widgets and icons to show up in the wrong size, and it addresses a bug with the Calculator app that could prevent zeroes from appearing.
The highlights of today’s release are the introduction of a new color grading tool that’s more akin to what you’d find in a video editor like Adobe Premiere or DaVinci Resolve, auto versioning that’s saved in the cloud (and hence not available in Lightroom Classic) and graphical watermarks, in addition to a number of other small feature updates across the application.
Just about everything you’d expect from a mobile version of Illustrator is here, from the pen, pencil, and brush tools, to layers, properties, and grid options, to basics like the type tool and path options. Some more specific features are still missing, but they may not be things you need day-to-day.
Where Illustrator really shines is within the Creative Cloud ecosystem, and Adobe acknowledges this. Many desktop designers will find the app a helpful companion for quick projects and on-the-go edits. Artists new to digital illustration have a long roadmap of new features to look forward to, and can grow their skills as the app becomes more powerful.
The company's dominance in search and the way it leverages its advertising business, its search business, the Chrome browser, and the Android operating system give the company gatekeeper status that it then uses unfairly to keep competitors out, the suit says.
The U.S. government said Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai met in 2018 to discuss the deal. After that, an unidentified senior Apple employee wrote to a Google counterpart that “our vision is that we work as if we are one company.”
The DOJ also cited internal Google documents that call the Apple search deal a “significant revenue channel” for the search giant and one that, if lost, would result in a “Code Red” scenario. That’s because nearly half of Google search traffic in 2019 came from Apple products, according to the lawsuit.
What is fascinating about this relationship is the number of ways in which is can be interpreted. From one perspective, the fact that Google has to pay so much to Apple is evidence that there is competition in the market. From another perspective, the fact that Apple can extract so much money from Google is evidence that it is Apple that has monopoly-like power over its value chain. A third perspective — surely the one endorsed by the Justice Department — is that the fact that Google values the default position so highly is ipso facto evidence that default position matters.
I suspect the true answer is a mixture of all three, with a dash of collusion.
As it stands now, Beats Flex are easy to recommend as starter Bluetooth headphones for anyone who wants to graduate past wired headphones. The $49 wireless headphones are perfect for Apple Watch users who want to play music or podcasts directly without an iPhone, and iPhone users can turn to Beats Flex as wireless headphones to replace the Lightning EarPods that were previously included in the box.
That doesn’t come as a surprise since Apple has added the Remote feature built into the Control Center in iOS 12, so Apple TV users can have access to all the controls on Siri Remote without having to download any app.
This means that Apple has to include headphones in the iPhone 12 box in France – and the solution the company has found is a box within a box.
Advertisers are projected to spend more than $800 million on podcasts in 2020, and companies are devising ways to provide them with data that will persuade them to spend more. The most common tactics include using IP addresses to identify users, adding tracking URLs to ads, and abandoning RSS in favor of proprietary platforms that already track their users.
The change has provoked considerable debate, sometimes combative, within the podcasting industry.
Looks to me Apple is not positioning the four iPhone models as a good-better-best kind of line up that it so often do for the other product lines. There are distinct advantages and 'weaknesses' for each of the differnet iPhone 12s, and the best phone for each person really weighs heavily on each person's priorities.
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Thanks for reading.