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.
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Apple is now selling a new generation LG UltraFine 4K Display for the same $699 price as the previous generation. The product is now listed at the Apple Online Store with shipping from tomorrow.
Apple today released a press statement featuring Apple News+ (Apple News Plus) following its initial debut in March with iOS 12.2. Whilst the company did not disclose any figures about number of users who have signed up to $9.99/month News+ subscription, Apple included endorsements from participating publishers and highlighted a UI change it made in iOS 12.3 to make following articles easier.
In the statement, Apple SVP Eddy Cue says Apple has hundreds of employees from editorial to engineering and design working on Apple News+, perhaps an indirect response to some of the early community feedback that criticized the News+ experience as confusing.
Apple has seemingly got clearance for the ECG app on Apple Watch Series 4. In the Health Canada database, ECG and irregular heart rate rhythm notifications are listed as being approved as of the 16th May. The listings were first spotted by the iPhone in Canada blog.
It therefore follows that Apple will soon be enabling the ECG app in Canada, perhaps whenever iOS 12.4 and watchOS 5.3 are publicly released.
Smart home maker Tado has today launched a new version of its Smart AC Controller (£89), available in the UK and many European countries. The controller works with air conditioning units and heat pumps that communicate with a remote over Infrared. The big news about V3 is that the Smart AC is now HomeKit compatible.
Apple announced Apple Card at its March services event with the draw of daily cashback as rewards. In a blog post, former Apple creative director Ken Segall reveals that Apple is no stranger to the credit card idea. In fact, in 2004, Steve Jobs / Apple was working on an iTunes credit card. The idea: spend money, get free music.
The saga of the LG UltraFine display mystery continues. After the disappearance of the LG 4K UltraFine display from the Apple Store, and the continued lack of availability for the 5K UltraFine, the plot thickens with the discovery from TidBITS that you can now buy a new 23.7-inch LG display from Apple that is otherwise unlisted.
The seemingly-unannounced display is priced at $699. This is the same price as the ‘old’ 21-inch 4K LG UltraFine, and a few hundred dollars below the sale price of the 5K sibling.
In June last year, Toshiba sold its memory division to a four-company consortium that included Apple. However, now, Toshiba is going to buy back the shares it sold off to Apple, Dell, Kingston, and Seagate – as reported by The Wall Street Journal. The companies are expected to collect a tidy profit from their investment.
A new app called AirSynth by Dave Wood takes a fun approach to the Face ID TrueDepth camera system available in the iPhone X series phones. Users simply wave their hands above the phone screen to control the synthesizer, like a pseudo-theremin.
Following the announcement of new speculative execution exploits that target Intel CPU architecture, Apple has posted a new document on its website that explains how customers with computers that are ‘at heightened risk’ of attack can enable full mitigation. Full mitigation is not enabled by default as it is probably an excessive amount of security for the average user, and it comes with big performance penalties.
In its tests, Apple recorded up to a 40 percent drop in performance with full mitigation activated. This is because enabling MDS protection involves disabling hyper-threading entirely, and adds additional barriers when the processor switches contexts.
Express Transit lets you use Apple Pay without requiring authentication like Touch ID or Face ID. This means you can make instant transactions at transit gates and terminals just by tapping your watch or phone.
Until recently, this convenience was limited to special transit cards like Suica in Japan. With iOS 12.3, Apple has now enabled the ability for any credit or debit card to be used with Express Transit. There is a catch though …
Pixelmator Pro today released version 1.3.4 with two major new features. ML Match Colors lets you drag an image into the Color Adjustments sidebar. Pixelmator Pro analyzes the image, pulls out the dominant colors, and then sets the adjustments such that the image in the canvas adopts the same color palette.
Pixelmator Pro also adds a new Free Transform tools to skew and perspective transform layers in the canvas. The original Pixelmator offered a Transform option, and now the developers have brought the same feature to Pixelmator Pro … and improved on it further.
Amazon is rolling out a new feature for its Echo smart speaker devices called Alexa Guard. Alexa Guard turns your Echo into a mini-home security device. It will listen out for noises like smoke alarms going off or smashed glass, and send alerts to your phone including audio clips and quick access to a video feed (if your Echo has a camera).
Following a beta test last year, the feature will soon be available to all Echo owners in the United States. You can start using it by enabling Guard in the Alexa app.
Apple’s VP of Apple Pay Jennifer Bailey today announced a new NFC feature for iPhone: special tags that trigger Apple Pay purchases when tapped, without the need to download a special app first. The company is partnering with Bird scooters, Bonobos clothing store, and PayByPhone parking meters for the initial rollout.
Apple also announced that inside the Wallet app, users will soon be able to sign up for loyalty cards in one tap, presumably presented to users as recommendations when they make eligible purchases.
Apple Music has added a set of playlists from Lifted Research Group, a streetwear clothing brand. The company said it is thrilled to be a part of Apple Music as it gives them an opportunity to ‘share our diversity in music’.
As Apple readies its supply chain for the fall iPhone bonanza, we are getting leaks thick and fast. This latest image was uploaded to Twitter by Mark Gurman.
It reaffirms renders from OnLeaks that all three flagship iPhones this year will feature the new square camera bump design, including the iPhone XR that will only have two cameras.
Over the weekend, Benjamin Geskin posted on Twitter claiming that a wave of Apple employees are now receiving their own branded Apple Card credit cards as part of a semi-private beta. Geskin posted photos of the purported card units, but note he has photoshopped over the engraved name to supposedly hide the source’s identity.
Supply chain sources have previously reported that the Apple A13 chip will be built by TSMC on a ‘7nm+’ process. In an article posted today, Bloomberg says that the A13 chip is now in trial production and could ramp up to mass production later in May.
The A13 chip will be used in the next-generation iPhone lineup, the 5.8-inch iPhone 11, 6.5-inch iPhone 11 Max and a successor to the 6.1-inch iPhone XR.
A rumor from iPhonesoft.fr out today suggests that iOS 13 will cut off several generations of iPhone. With iOS 12, Apple supported every device that could run iOS 11, boosting performance across all models all the way back to iPhone 5s. If today’s report is to believed, it is the end road for a large chunk of active iPhone models.
Case manufacturers love to get prepared early for the next iPhone redesign, and this year they are getting the jump on the hump. The iPhone 11 will abandon the traffic-like vertical camera design seen in iPhone XS and instead adopt a triple-camera system with a new bump in a rounded-rectangle shape.
As first leaked by OnLeaks in January, the three cameras are arranged in a triangular pattern. The cameras, microphone, and flash are housed in a square protrusion about the size of an Apple Watch.
Intel told its investors today that it is finally ready to ship 10-nanometer ‘Ice Lake’ mobile CPUs next month, following three years of delays for the company’s 10nm fabrication. Meanwhile, Intel’s competitors like TSMC are already boasting 7nm production (the Apple A12 chip present in iPhone XS and iPad Pro is 7nm).
The initial batch of Ice Lake CPUs are aimed at mobile contexts like laptops. Devices featuring 10nm Intel Ice Lake chips are expected to launch by the end of this year.
Apple Pay is now available in Iceland for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac users. In a somewhat-unexpected launch, Apple Pay is now live with Arion and Landsbankinn. If you have a credit or debit card with one of those banks, head to the Wallet app to add your card …
Apple has now shortlisted a few locations in India where it plans to launch its first retail store. Unsurprisingly, Apple wants prime real estate. Bloomberg says the company is looking at ‘upscale sites in Mumbai’, with glamor analogous to Fifth Avenue in New York.
The publication says a decision will come within weeks, at which point Apple will make a formal application to the Indian government. Up to now, Apple has been prevented from launching its own stores in India due to domestic manufacturing requirements.
Bloomberg today posted a lengthy report on what it expects Apple to announce in iOS 13, watchOS 6 and macOS 10.15. Apple will officially announce these new operating systems at WWDC on June 3.
New information from Bloomberg includes details on the redesigned Reminders app, updates to iMessage and Apple Books, frequent locations options in Maps and more. Apple Watch will get new Calculator, (audio)Books, and Voice Memos apps as well as adding an on-device App Store so users can download apps directly from the Watch.
Apple stock ($AAPL) has once again crossed the $1 trillion market cap level as its shares rose 6% in early trading following its Q2 earnings call.
AAPL stock is currently priced at $212.68, with a market cap of approximately $1,003,000,000,000. The company stock closed at around $200 yesterday but rocketed upwards in the wake of Apple reporting its financial results for the financial quarter just gone.