iOS devices refer to any of Apple’s hardware that runs the iOS mobile operating system which include iPhones, iPads, and iPods. Historically, Apple releases a new iOS version once a year, the current version is iOS 10. Here is the complete list of iOS 10 compatible devices.
Late last year Square released its updated Square Reader for accepting contactless and chip payment methods on iPhones and iPads, which means small businesses and pop up shops can take Apple Pay payments from iPhones and Apple Watches without expensive terminal systems. The new Square Reader goes for $49 with transaction fees set at 2.75% so you keep $97.25 out of every $100 sent through Square. Square’s app lets you create mobilized businesses on iPhones and iPads, and we’ve tested the new Apple Pay-ready reader to see just how easy it all is.
Public beta testers can now try the new OS X 10.11.4 prerelease that first hit developers earlier this week. New features include Live Photo viewing and sharing in Messages, secure password protection for individual notes in Apple’s Notes app, and other improvements. Check out our full coverage of OS X 10.11.4 and other betas released earlier this week below:
The public beta version of iOS 9.3 for non-developer testers is now available. The first iOS 9.3 beta was first released earlier this week to registered developers and includes a number of new mid-cycle features and enhancements. These include secure passwords and Touch ID protection for Notes, a new Night Shift feature to adjust display temperate in the evening, and expanded 3D Touch quick actions on the latest iPhones. iOS 9.3 Beta 1.1 is also available for registered developers.
Korea’s ET News claims that Samsung will become Apple’s primary supplier of OLED display panels, stating that an agreement has “practically been decided.” Samsung is reportedly gearing-up for the contract with an initial investment of between $2.49B and $3.32B in plant and equipment, rising to $7.47B depending on order levels.
Apple currently uses OLED displays in the Watch. Rumors that it will switch to OLED for the iPhone have been doing the rounds for many years, but have been getting much more specific of late. The switch is said to be happening in 2018, with Apple recently reported to be ‘close to agreement‘ with suppliers. The most recent report named both Samsung and LG as likely suppliers …
While we’ve heard tales of gloom and despair from other Apple suppliers, leading analysts and media alike to suggest that the iPhone market might be contracting for the first time ever, it’s rather a different story with key Apple chipmaker TSMC. Focus Taiwan reports that its 2015 earnings were the highest in its 29-year history.
The company posted NT$306.57 billion (US$9.15 billion) in net profit for 2015, a 16.2 percent annual increase. TSMC’s 2015 earnings per share was NT$11.82, compared with NT$10.18 the previous year, and its consolidated sales rose 10.6 percent to NT$843.497 billion, it said.
Profits and earnings per share were also record-breaking …
Phil Schiller said in 2013 that “education is in Apple’s DNA,” and it’s no exaggeration. The company’s commitment to the education sector was there from the very beginning. Steve Jobs told the Smithsonian that he wanted to donate a computer to every school in the U.S. as long ago as 1979.
I thought if there was just one computer in every school, some of the kids would find it. It will change their life. We saw the rate at which this was happening and the rate at which the school bureaucracies were deciding to buy a computer for the school and it was real slow. We realized that a whole generation of kids was going to go through the school before they even got their first computer so we thought the kids can’t wait. We wanted to donate a computer to every school in America.
The company couldn’t afford it in those days, but Steve lobbied Congress to introduce a bill that would have created sufficient tax breaks to make it possible. That attempt failed, but Apple did succeed in brokering a tax deal in California that saw the company donate an Apple IIe to every school in California. Apple led the PC market in education for a time, and even created education-specific Mac models.
More recently, Apple appeared set to bring its educational success into the iPad era in 2013 when it announced a $30M deal (that would eventually have been worth a quarter of a billion dollars) to equip every student in the LA Unified School District with an iPad. If that program had succeeded, it would have created a template for rolling out similar ones across the whole of the USA. Instead, it failed catastrophically, and it now appears that Chromebooks are winning where iPads have failed …
The New York Post reports that Apple is closely following the situation with Time Warner; the company is facing pressure from investors to put itself up for sale and Apple is interested in acquiring it. Many investors believe Time Warner stock is trading far below its asset value and many investors believe that a buyout or spinoff of some kind is the best option.
Apple could use the company to accelerate its efforts to launch a digital streaming cable service for Apple TV. Time Warner controls a vast content library, including popular shows like Game of Thrones as well as entities like CNN News. More importantly perhaps, it has deals in place with every channel that Apple would need to become a full TV platform.
Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple has struggled to create a skinny bundle of programming from existing content partners. A deal with Time Warner would give Apple most of what it needs: CNN news, Turner Sports and such hugely popular shows as “Game of Thrones” and “Sesame Street” from HBO — not to mention Warner Bros. movies and TV shows.
Although there is a chance Apple could buyout the whole company, Time Warner may end up spinning off parts of the business, although the CEO is resistant.
Last July, sales of iOS devices caught up with sales of Windows devices, making it a tight race as to who would ship the most units as 2015 wrapped up. Now, Asymco has shared a chart depicting the extraordinary growth of iPhone shipments and showing that in 2015, iPhone shipments overtook Windows shipments as a whole.
This week’s iOS 9.3 beta software update for iPhone and iPad is a pretty major release for a mid-cycle version. New features including the F.lux-like Night Shift which lets you change the color temperature of your display and Touch ID plus secure passwords for Notes feel more major version features. Other parts like new 3D Touch quick actions for many of Apple’s stock apps feel more like playing catch up, but overall iOS 9.3 is shaping up to be an impressive release. Check out the details below:
A new patent awarded to Apple today suggests that the company’s audio plans for future iPhones may go beyond reportedly ditching the 3.5mm headphone socket in favor of Lightning and Bluetooth. The patent is very densely-worded, but seemingly describes a method of getting higher-quality and higher-volume audio from speakers built into slimmer devices.
Apple’s statement of the problem is clear enough.
Given the area constraints imposed on many portable electronic devices, it is increasingly difficult to provide high-quality audio sound output and pickup without hindering the ability to make portable electronic devices smaller and thinner. Consequently, there is a need for improved approaches to provide high-quality audio sound output and/or pickup from portable electronic devices as they get smaller and thinner.
The language describing Apple’s proposed solution is less clear, but from a combination of this and the accompanying diagrams, I at least have a working theory of what is being suggested …
Personally, I’m a coward where betas are concerned. Trying one on a secondary device is fine, but I tend to steer clear of them on my daily drivers.
But the iOS 9.3 beta, released yesterday, was a big one! There was Night Shift, that gradually warms the colors on the display to match our natural circadian rhythms, making it easier to fall asleep after staring at the screen until late. Notes secured by Touch ID. Better access to health data. Improved Apple Music integration within CarPlay. Improved personalization for News. And additional 3D Touch functionality for the stock apps.
Not only that, but our usage so far suggests that it’s an extremely stable beta, with no issues at all noted yet …
A senior Microsoft spokesman dismissed the iPad Pro as nothing more than a companion device, contrasting it with the Microsoft Surface when speaking to TrustedReviews.
Dan Laycock, Senior Communications Manager for Microsoft Surface, says that while consumers can get by with a single Surface product, the same can’t be said for Apple’s heftiest tablet.
“Microsoft really wants you to only carry one device for tablet and PC use,” explains Laycock, speaking to us at the Consumer Electronics Show 2016 in Las Vegas. “Whereas the iPad Pro is always going to be a companion device.”
Laycock also said that “at one point in time, Apple declared that if there’s a stylus, that’s failure” – a reference to a quote by Steve Jobs when referring to early smartphones. Apple, of course, argues that the Apple Pencil as an optional accessory for some tasks is very different to a device which cannot easily be used without a stylus.
Benchmark tests last year showed that the Apple Pencil offered lower latency than Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4 stylus.
Earlier today, Apple announced iOS 9.3, a fairly significant point update to iOS 9. The new operating system adds new features for the Health, Wallet, Notes, and Settings apps, in addition to a Night Mode and new 3D Touch shortcuts. This gallery below shows off all of the new features, and here’s a bulleted list of everything new in the first beta:
With the new Apple TV tvOS 9.2 beta, Apple has added a whole host of new features to the tvOS platform. This includes support for pairing Bluetooth keyboards, Folders organisation for apps on the home screen, a new App Switcher UI and a native Apple Podcasts app.
There are also some enhancements to Siri and other improvements. Apple has added support for two new Siri languages: US Spanish and French Canadian. More images after the break …
Besides a new suite of enhancements for educational uses, Apple’s upcoming iOS 9.3 release, which went into beta this morning, adds several consumer-facing features. Apple highlights these on a website previewing the update. Notably, the update adds a system-wide Night Mode that uses the device’s time and location to present certain colors around the software optimized for darker environments:
Many studies have shown that exposure to bright blue light in the evening can affect your circadian rhythms and make it harder to fall asleep. Night Shift uses your iOS device’s clock and geolocation to determine when it’s sunset in your location. Then it automatically shifts the colors in your display to the warmer end of the spectrum, making it easier on your eyes. In the morning, it returns the display to its regular settings. Pleasant dreams.
The software also includes upgraded Notes, News, and Health apps. The updated Notes application now uses the Touch ID feature for logging into apps and has improved sorting options:
Apple is rolling out a lot of new features with iOS 9.3, which just hit beta. Most notably, for students a single iPad can now be shared amongst multiple people. This means that each student can log in and access their own personal data. Multi-user support has been a big request for iPad owners for some time, and it seems Apple is finally answering the call … at least for the education market.
Apple is also launching a new Classroom app. This is a digital teaching assistant app, which can present quizzes, load AirPlay content onto an Apple TV and much more.
If you’re feeling jealous of any friends grandfathered into an existing AT&T unlimited data plan (especially since ‘unlimited’ was redefined from ‘5GB before throttling kicks in’ to ’22GB before throttling if congested’), the company has good news: it is launching a brand new version of unlimited data tomorrow.
Pricing starts at $100/month for a single line, plus $40 for each individual line. Unfortunately, there’s bad news too. As The Verge notes, there are some pretty big catches – the biggest of which is that you need to be a DirecTV or U-Verse subscriber to even be eligible, which of course adds to the cost if you don’t already have a subscription …
If all the recent reports turn out to be true, it looks like Apple might actually ditch the 3.5mm headphone jack for the next-generation iPhone later this year. It’s been a long-time coming, not just since Apple started preparing for the transition with audio over Lightning for headphone makers a couple years back, but also since wireless Bluetooth headphones have become good enough in recent years to replace wired solutions that rely on the 3.5mm jack we’ve used for the last century or so.
Apple is no stranger to being first to ditch old technologies while ushering in the new (think floppy drive, optical drives, and everything on the new 12-inch MacBook, as a few examples), but how do you feel about this particular transition?
An unlikely report from Chinese site MyDrivers accompanied by an even unlikelier-looking graphic claims that Apple’s new 4-inch phone will not be named the iPhone 6c, as expected, but will instead be dubbed the iPhone 5e. The letter ‘e’ supposedly stands for ‘enhanced.’
Now, the latest news shows, this new machine might be called iPhone 5e (I did not expect), as the letter “e” represents enhanced [referring to] the addition of Apple Pay, NFC and VoLTE Features.
The report also claims that the spec of the phone will be lower than previously rumored, having an A8 processor and 1GB RAM rather than the expected A9 and 2GB. This would essentially give it the same internals as the latest iPod touch …
[Update 1/11: This is one rumor Apple is happy to deny. Here’s a statement to Buzzfeed:“There is no truth to this rumor,” Apple spokesperson Trudy Muller said in a statement to BuzzFeed News. “We are entirely focused on switching users from Android to iPhone, and that is going great.”]
Apple launched a Move to iOS app in September, pictured, that enables Android users to quickly transfer documents, photos, contacts and other personal data to a new iPhone. This eases the pain for Android users to switch to iOS, which clearly benefits Apple. Interestingly, the Telegraph is reporting that Apple is now developing a similar tool that goes in the opposite direction, letting iPhone users more easily transfer to Android devices.
With its resources from the 2014 acquisition of headphone maker Beats Electronics, Apple is prototyping a completely new set of Bluetooth earphones with the potential of launching the accessory alongside the iPhone 7 this fall. The new earphones are said to be completely wireless, which is to say that they do not even have a cable connecting the left and right ear pieces. Sources say that the headphones are similar in concept to the Motorola Hint headset (pictured above) and Bragi’s new Dash headphones that were shown at CES this week.
We asked you yesterday to tell us how exciting you found the possibilities opened up by Apple’s patent for twin rear-facing cameras, and the results were very clear: 70.4% of you selected either ‘very exciting’ or ‘take my money.’
In addition to the possible applications I outlined in the piece, some of you had additional ideas that might be made possible by the dual-camera tech which has been rumored for the iPhone 7 …
