Follow Benjamin on Threads to keep up with his latest projects. Benjamin blogs about Apple news and rumors and posts insightful product and app reviews. Read his work on 9to5Mac and his personal blog.
Benjamin Mayo also creates apps for iOS as a professional indie developer and contractor; more details here. Email to discuss making your iOS project.
Follow @bzamayo on Twitter and follow @bzamayo on Threads.
Throughout November, we saw reports of cuts at many iPhone suppliers, supposedly due to order cuts from Apple regarding demand weakness in iPhone XS and iPhone XR.
However, arguably the two most important members of Apple’s supply chain, Foxconn assembly and A12 chipmaker TSMC, just reported good revenues for November (via Bloomberg).
Apple is continuing to increase the prominence of its limited time iPhone sales offer, which enables customers to buy iPhone XS and iPhone XR for cheaper when trading in an existing iPhone model …
Apple is continuing to promote upgrades to the iPhone XR today with an item in the Today view of the App Store. The editorial describes key features of the iPhone XR and then highlights apps that take advantage of the new hardware like the Face ID sensor or the speed of the A12 chip.
Apple Watch Series 4 is getting the hotly anticipated ECG feature today. The ECG app will appear for customers using Apple Watch in the United States, after updating to watchOS 5.1.2 (releasing later today). The 5.1.2 update will also include irregular heart rate notifications for Apple Watch Series 1 through Series 4.
To take an ECG, users simply place their finger on the digital crown and wait for 30 seconds whilst the Watch scans the electrical impulses in your finger.
Pixelmator Pro has already won Apple’s App of the Year award in the Mac App Store but its constant update schedule never ceases. Today, Pixelmator Pro adds a redesigned Color Balance tool to tint shadows, midtones and highlights. The UI exposes three color wheels, with brightness and saturation sliders flanking each side of the orb. Simply slide to adjust the cast and mood of an image.
Pixelmator Pro 1.2.4 also includes some new resizing modes, like the Lanczos algorithm for higher-quality downsampling and Nearest Neighbor for pixel artwork. As always, these new features are offered as a free update available in the Mac App Store.
We have already seen Apple aggressively promote trade in bonuses, moves that the company does not typically make in the wake of the release of new iPhones. However, it seems like Apple is working harder than ever to push unit sales this time around.
Bloomberg reports that Apple told some marketing staff to put their work on hold and switch to focusing on iPhone marketing, another sign that iPhone XS and iPhone XR sales are not as strong.
Apple’s biggest supply chain partner, Foxconn, is looking to start a new facility in Vietnam as a way to hedge against instability and uncertainty in its current production facilities due to the ongoing trade war between China and the US.
As reported by Reuters, Vietnamese state media are reporting Foxconn and the Hanoi People’s Committee are in active discussions to set up an iPhone factory.
Riffing on the tune of ‘Grandma Got Run over by a Reindeer’, Microsoft has posted a new ad for the Surface Go which pokes fun at the iPad for not being a real computer …
In the latest post on its machine learning blog, the Apple audio software engineering team explains the challenges of speech detection for smart speakers, and how it uses machine learning models running on the HomePod’s A8 chip to help improve far-field accuracy.
Just as it has done in the past with the 3G and LTE transition, Bloomberg says Apple will bide its time and not jump on the 5G cellular train with the 2019 iPhone. Carriers will rollout 5G coverage in certain areas next year, and manufacturers like Samsung are set to launch 5G-capable phones at the same time.
The report says Apple will wait at least until the 2020 iPhone revision to add 5G radios. Bloomberg’s report, citing sources familiar with the matter, lines up with the supply chain mumblings we’ve been hearing.
The AirPods truly-wireless earbuds are on track to be Apple’s best growth product for the foreseeable future, according to Ming-Chi Kuo. Kuo said that Apple will release an “upgraded model with wireless charging support” in the first quarter of 2019.
Kuo also said an all-new design for AirPods is currently on track to launch in early 2020 …
For the first time ever, Apple partnered with The Ellen Show to give the whole audience an iPhone, the iPhone XR. In a rather cringey skit with Julia Roberts, Ellen DeGeneres announces to the crowd that they are all getting the brand new iPhone.
iOS 12 adoption continues to steadily increase, outpacing iOS 11 by several weeks. Last year, Mixpanel recorded 75% share for iOS 11 on December 17th. iOS 12 reached the same milestone yesterday, or about three weeks faster.
Mixpanel data comes from analytics frameworks inside apps and mobile websites, logging the OS version for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices it sees in the wild …
Apple Pay has today launched in Belgium. Just like everywhere else in the world, Apple Pay enables you to make transactions at retail stores using the contactless NFC chip inside the iPhone and Apple Watch. You can also pay using Apple Pay on the web in Safari for iOS or Safari for Mac.
The Belgium local launch partners include Fortis, Fintro and Hello Bank. Get started with Apple Pay now using the Wallet app on your iPhone.
Update: These three brands are seemingly all part of the same conglomerate, BNP Paribas. The other big banks in Belgium have yet to join the Apple Pay train.
Apple CEO Tim Cook and presidential adviser Ivanka Trump are today visiting the Idaho Wilder school district, as first reported by the Idaho Statesmen. Apple donated an iPad to every student at Wilder in 2016, to encourage furthering the use of technology in education.
Today’s visit is focused on the administration’s science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) initiatives. Ivanka Trump has previously reached out to Cook and Apple for advice on funding and advancing STEM education across America.
As rumored last week, Apple is indirectly lowering the price of the iPhone XR in Japan through larger carrier subsidies. On a 24 month contract, new customers to NTT Docomo can save about $100 over the life of their plan with the new reduced price.
The carrier business model in Japan relies on device subsidies to attract customers, similar to how the US smartphone market used to work. Total instalments for iPhone XR 64 GB on a 24 month contract would total 36,000 yen before this announcement. Now, the device cost drops to 24,000 yen (excluding the price of the mandatory contract fees).
Apple’s Black Friday deals have gone live in the US and sure enough they match what we saw in the Australian market. You can get an Apple Store gift card up to $280 value with the purchase of Mac, or $70 when buying an iPhone 8 or iPhone 7.
Check out the 9to5Toys deals hub for the best Black Friday promotions spanning all retailers, which will easily beat Apple’s first-hand sales with real discounts and savings on the latest iPhones, Macs, iPads and more.
Update: Apple fixed it. Original story below. Siri uses Wikipedia results to feed much of its knowledge base. This can of course backfire as Wikipedia is editable by anyone, including internet vandals. In this case, Siri is returning a very Not Safe For Work image when asked ‘Who is Donald Trump?’.
Apple is set to lower prices of the iPhone XR in Japan by offering subsidies to Japanese carriers, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal this morning. The price drops are apparently going into effect as soon as next week. The $750 price is somewhat disguised in Japan due to bundled carrier contracts, but the device is seemingly being overshadowed by the still popular iPhone 8 in the region.
In that same vein, the report says Apple is actually restarting production of the iPhone X for sale in certain markets …
Apple is apparently considering new avenues for how to spread the reach of its upcoming original content TV show service, via The Information. The report says Apple is toying with the idea of making a cheap TV dongle similar to the Chromecast or Amazon Fire TV Stick.
If it went through with the idea, it would represent a pretty big shakeup to its set-top TV offerings, as its current Apple TV lineup is anything but ‘low-cost’.
Dual SIM is one of the big new features for the iPhone XS and iPhone XR and it was technically enabled with iOS 12.1. However, the big US carriers held back on supporting Dual SIM activations due to various reasons.
In an internal memo shared with 9to5Mac, Verizon is telling its employees that it now expects to launch Dual SIM activations for eSIM and physical SIMs in early December.
As many suppliers and analysts raise concerns about iPhone sales outlook, Foxconn is setting out to cut costs according to an internal memo seen by Bloomberg. Foxconn is Apple’s biggest assembler of iPhones so its performance is often seen as a proxy for Apple itself.
Foxconn aims to reduce costs by almost 20 billion yuan ($3bn) for the 2019 year, which includes laying off about ten percent of its ‘non-technical’ workforce.
Apple is doing something a bit different for Black Friday this year. It is set to announce a four-day shopping event that stretches from November 23rd through November 26.
You can click here to add the shopping event to your calendar. The event is obviously centered around the US Thanksgiving holiday, but offers will be available in many regions worldwide.
We heard already from various Apple suppliers that they were cutting their sales forecasts, suggesting the latest iPhone models were not doing as well as expected. The Journal today says that Apple reduced orders for both iPhone XS and iPhone XR.
Apple has apparently found it hard to accurately predict demand for its three model lineup amidst an overall slowdown of the smartphone market and seemingly-weak Chinese demand. The changes to the production schedules are frustrating suppliers, according to the Wall Street Journal.