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 has just announced its March 25 event and — unlike last year’s March education event — this one will be live streamed. You will indeed be able to watch Apple’s TV event on your Apple TV.
US senator Elizabeth Warren announced a radical plan today to ‘break up big tech’. As a candidate for the 2020 presidential race, Warren proposes new restrictions on how much freedom tech firms have to control proprietary platforms.
She wants to stop companies, including Apple, from taking advantage of the monopolistic power granted by app stores to levy fees on other developers whilst promoting their own services above others.
Apple acquired Texture last year but it has not pulled the Texture app from the iOS or Android app stores. In fact, the company released a miscellaneous app update this morning ahead of the expected March 25 event where Apple will announce its Apple News subscription service, essentially incorporating a (rebranded) Texture service into the News app.
As announced last month, the Eve Flare is now available to buy in the US, and I’ve been testing one for the last week or so.
It’s a spherically shaped multicolor mood light that illuminates in either shades of white or most RGB colors. You can control it with Siri through HomeKit, which of course means you get the fun of shouting colors at your HomePod to change the lighting in the room. Read below for my full hands on …
Apple talks about augmented reality at any opportunity it gets, but so far its fierce ambition has only materialized to consumers as ARKit apps on the iPhone and iPad. It has been widely reported that Apple is developing an AR glasses / headset product.
Today, Ming-Chi Kuo reports that Apple’s first augmented reality product will go into mass production as soon as the fourth quarter of this year, but hedges the timeframe slightly and says it will be mass-produced by the second quarter of 2020 at the latest.
The iPhone XS and XS Max will experience slight animation stutters after about ten seconds of inactivity. This is usually most visible when swiping to go home after reading static content in the foreground app for more than ten seconds without touching the screen. We’ve been tracking this issue for a few months now and the problem continues to be present in the iOS 12.2 betas.
As first rumored late last year, Apple’s manufacturing partners are full steam ahead on setting up production facilities in India, to make current generation iPhones. Domestic manufacturing is key to avoiding India’s hefty import taxes on foreign goods, allowing Apple to lower prices in the country.
Today, India’s IT ministry signed off on plans for a new $1m Wistron factory in India. It is expected that the factory will produce iPhone 8 phones whilst an ongoing factory proposal from Foxconn will manufacture ‘Made in India’ iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max models.
Apple plans to add 1200 new jobs in San Diego over the next three years with some posts occupied by the end of 2019. Company representatives and San Diego’s mayor made the announcement this morning at the UTC mall Apple Store.
MacRumors is purporting to have got their hands on video of an upcoming ad campaign for new AirPods 2. The sequence shows a woman taking her AirPods out of ears and ends with a title card that reads ‘AirPods 2’. Update: MacRumors is now saying this is fake and was created as a marketing stunt by a PR company. Show’s over folks.
Weakness in Chinese smartphone sales in the holiday quarter led Apple to report its first guidance miss in 16 years. Both Tim Cook and external analysts have tentatively said that market conditions are slowly improving.
In January, major Apple Chinese resellers cut the price of iPhone XR models. This week, the same resellers are pushing iPhone XS with price promotions, as first reported by the Taipei Central News Agency.
Seemingly through a server-side change, Apple is quietly updating some of the international Siri text-to-speech synthesizers. Last month, some readers commented that the British male voice had been upgraded and we can confirm that the British female voice has also been updated as of this week. The change can be heard on iPhone and iPad as well as the HomePod.
The 2018 MacBook Pro appears to avoid the stage light issues that are plaguing some fraction of the 2016-2017 models. What iFixit highlights in its latest blog post is that the display flex cable is actually longer in the 2018 iteration than earlier MacBook Pros.
iFixit measured it as a 2mm size difference. That number is small in absolute terms but when tolerances are this tight across the machine, a couple millimetres can make a big difference.
A report today says that Apple executives are interfering with the production of its original content television shows. Producers reportedly describe that Apple is difficult to work with, “citing a lack of transparency, lack of clarity and intrusive executives”.
Cook has apparently told producers to not be so mean as Apple attempts to balance a demand for gripping dramas and story narratives with its all-inclusive family friendly corporate brand. The interruptions and changes are causing delays. The New York Post says the streaming service will launch with just a few shows at the end of the year.
Apple has been promising the AirPods wireless charging case for 537 days (and counting). Twitter leaker Max Weinbach was featured in EverythingApplePro’s video today with some few tidbits on the AirPods wireless charging situation. However, Weinbach doesn’t really have a track record of accuracy yet with Apple news, so we are treating these reports as sketchy rumors at this time.
Last month, we covered a macOS Keychain exploit that seemingly could expose user credentials and passwords. At the time, the researcher Linus Henze did not disclose the workings of the exploit to Apple as a protest because Apple does not offer a bug bounty reward scheme for macOS. Despite no change on that front from Apple, Henze has now decided to share his findings with the company to protect users.
Throughout March, Apple will be featuring female entrepreneurs, creatives and engineers across its platforms to celebrate International Women’s Day. We have already reported on the upcoming Activity Challenge and special Today at Apple schedule, but Apple is doing even more.
Every day in March, the App of the Day in the App Store will feature apps that are built, led or founded by women. On Fridays, Apple will do richer editorials with female members of the tech industry.
As spotted by MySmartPrice, an Indian database is also surfacing model identifiers for as-yet-unannounced new iPad models as the units have received regional certification. The model identifiers A2124 and A2133 were first discovered in the Eurasian Economic Commission database last month.
Smart shades and blinds are cool, but they are not cheap. The SOMA Smart Shades is an adaptor for existing blinds to make them remotely controllable without having to shell out for all-new blinds. For HomeKit integration, you need at least one Soma Connect hub too.
Apple has today announced the winning photographers, and their photos, of its Shot on iPhone contest that it ran at the end of January. The winning images will be featured on Apple billboards, in Apple retail, and as part of online Shot on iPhone features.
The ten shots were chosen by a panel of judges, including photographer Austin Mann and Apple’s own Phil Schiller. The shots were taken on a variety of models, from iPhone 7 through iPhone XS Max …
Apple is actively developing sleep tracking features for the Apple Watch, as reported by Bloomberg. The report indicates that the sleep tracking features would be tied to new hardware, rather than a watchOS software update.
The publication says that Apple employees have been testing sleep tracking features at its campus for several months with an aim to launch native sleep tracking features for Apple Watch by next year. Apple typically releases new versions of the Watch in the fall.
Warren Buffett, through his company Berkshire Hathaway, is Apple’s second biggest shareholder, having dramatically increased his stake in the last few years. In an interview with CNBC, Buffett says that he is unlikely to sell his AAPL shares, and would buy more if it was cheaper.
About a week ago, we heard reports that the A13 chip destined for this year’s iPhones will continue to be fabricated at the same 7 nanometer feature size as the A12. Digitimes today notes that for the 2020 iPhone, we will again see another miniaturisation leap.
Apple and Goldman Sachs are readying a joint credit card, according to the Wall Street Journal. The new credit card will integrate with the Apple Wallet app on the iPhone to offer special features like the ability to set spending goals and track purchase rewards. The card would purportedly offer rewards like 2% cashback, and maybe more when buying Apple gear.
The report says the new card will be tested with employees in the next month or so with a launch later in the year. The Wallet app has undergone a significant design change in the iOS 12.2 beta, so it makes sense that Apple has bigger plans in the offing.
In a statement to Macerkopf, Apple’s vice president of Apple Music and International Content announces that App Store payments to European developers have just exceeded $25 billion.