iPhone

A brief report claims that Apple will be adding a Chinese NAND storage chip supplier to its roster. The company has in the past bought these chips from Toshiba, SK Hynix and Samsung, but is now said to be in talks with Yangtze Memory Technologies.

The report is light on detail, but does make one interesting claim …

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KGI continues to double-down on its claims on what the 2018 iPhone lineup will comprise. The 6.1-inch LCD iPhone will apparently resemble the iPhone X with a similar full-screen design, but at a more accessible price for customers; the analyst expects this new iPhone to be priced to replace iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, as cheap as $699.

The LCD 6.1-inch iPhone will use slightly less premium components, such as an aluminium frame instead of stainless steel. Nevertheless, given that it looks like a top-end iPhone in style, KGI believes the lower entry point will make it Apple’s most popular 2018 device and see total sales around 100 million units.

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Global smartphone sales were weaker than expected in the second half of 2017, says TrendForce. It predicts that growth will slow to 2.8% this year, and says that there are ‘only two international brands with a clear future of growth in 2018’ …

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Apple has shot down the significance of an apparent source code leak for the iPhone’s iBoot bootloader which loads the operating system. The original report flagged the source code leak as the ‘biggest leak in history’ based on one researcher’s description, but Apple has significantly downplayed any risks associated with the leak while seemingly confirming its authenticity.

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Barclays is out today with its latest analyst note which includes wait times for iPhone battery replacements appear to be declining. While this is good news for customers, the firm describes how this could potentially negatively affect Apple.

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KGI said back in October of last year it was likely that Apple would bring Face ID to all three of this year’s new iPhone models, and this is supported by two new supply-chain reports today.

The reports says that Face ID is coming to the LCD iPhone as well as the flagship OLED ones, and that Apple is diversifying suppliers for the 3D face recognition modules needed for the feature …

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The final list for Emoji 11.0 has been finalized and it features 157 new emoji. The Unicode Consortium has announced that among the latest emoji will be superheroes, redheads, partying face, hot face, cold face, infinity, and much more.

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UPDATE: Apple has responded to Reuters regarding the announcement of the iPhone throttling, which can be found at the end of the post.

Recode reports that Apple is looking into the possibility of reimbursing customers who have paid the full $79 for an iPhone battery replacement. Lawmaker Sen. John Thune asked Apple about the issue and the company says that it is exploring ways to do so.

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If you’ve got any recent model iPhone, you’ve got a great camera – both for still photos and for video. So good, in fact, that many independent filmmakers use it to shoot both shorts and full-length movies.

But such reports can give a somewhat misleading impression. Very often, the iPhone is the capture device, but it’s coupled to far more expensive supplementary kit like professional lenses, and gimbals to smooth footage.

What DJI has done with its latest gimbal is to bring smooth mobile shooting – and more – down to a price level that makes it extremely affordable. So much so that, when you consider all the things it can do, I’d say it qualifies as the best-value iPhone accessory on the market at the moment …

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As initially reported last year, The New York Police Department is moving away from Windows Phones after two years with the platform. Replacing some 36,000 Windows phones are iPhones, which are now being rolled out to police officers…

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Pegatron – Apple’s secondary iPhone assembler alongside Foxconn – has said that it is optimistic about demand for high-end phones this year.

We are rather positive about the premium phone segment for all of 2018. We will also be benefiting from expanding adoptions of new artificial intelligence and augmented reality features to go into those high-end phones …

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IHS Markit is out with its 2017 data on smartphone shipments. The firms’ numbers are a bit more positive than what we saw yesterday from Strategy Analytics, pointing to a smaller quarterly decline along with a greater increase in year-over-year shipments. The data also puts iPhone in first place with the highest share of holiday quarter smartphone sales.

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Following Apple’s record earnings release earlier today, Strategy Analytics is out this evening with new data on the smartphone industry. The analytics firm says that global smartphone shipments suffered their largest annual decrease during the holiday quarter…

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During Apple’s Q1 2018 earnings call today, Tim Cook addressed Apple’s on-going iPhone battery replacement program and controversy concerning its practice of slowing down iPhones with aging batteries. Cook was asked about whether or not Apple sees the iPhone battery repair program having an effect on upgrade rates moving forward.

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As we await the release of Apple’s first quarter earnings tomorrow, some of the company’s suppliers are offering a peak at what we might see. As Bloomberg notes, both Qualcomm and Broadcom implied during their own respective earnings announcements that iPhone orders are slowing down more than normal for this time of year…

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Apple has effectively confirmed yesterday’s Bloomberg report that both the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission have launched investigations into whether Apple may have broken the law by throttling iPhone performance to prevent unexpected shutdowns.

The company has also given a statement in response …

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