iPhone

We said yesterday that the war of words on the Apple/FBI dispute were hotting up, and Edward Snowden has now taken things a step further, suggesting that the FBI’s claims that they need Apple to access the iPhone are … not true. His comments were reported by The Intercept, which posted video of the discussion at a civil liberties conference.

“The FBI says Apple has the ‘exclusive technical means’” to unlock the phone, Snowden said during a discussion at Common Cause’s Blueprint for Democracy conference.

“Respectfully, that’s bullsh*t,” he said, over a video link from Moscow.

Snowden had earlier described how the FBI could physically extract the passcode from the iPhone chip, and has now linked to an explanation of how the agency could bypass the auto-erase feature …

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While an earlier public poll showed the majority of the public siding with the FBI in the dispute over whether Apple should be forced to help the government break into an iPhone, the public mood appears to be shifting. A WSJ/NBC poll shows that, overall, American voters are now almost evenly split on the issue.

Neither the WSJ nor NBC has yet released the full poll – only the results relating to the Republican primary race – but CNET has reported the numbers.

Overall, American voters are evenly divided over whether Apple should cooperate with FBI efforts to crack open a terrorist’s iPhone.

47 percent said they feared the government wouldn’t go far enough in protecting national security, while 44 percent feared it would intrude too far into citizens’ privacy.

As you’d expect, there was a significant difference in views among registered Republicans and Democrats …

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It has begun. The first images of purported iPhone 7 case leaks have started to appear online today. If true, the new iPhone will look very similar to the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6 with curved corners and a flat back. Notably, this case does not include a hole for a 3.5 mm headphone jack — reinforcing rumors that Apple will drop it in favor of Bluetooth or Lightning headphones.

On the bottom of the phone, it appears to feature only a Lightning port surrounded by two equal-width speaker grilles, which could mean the phone will include some kind of stereo sound output. Aside from the lack of a headphone port, it’s hard to see any other major differences from the case leak. More images after the break, via @OnLeaks …

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Following a report last week that said Apple is looking to release an OLED iPhone sometime in 2017, Digitimes today reports that the company is planning a 5.8-inch OLED device (via The Motley Fool). While the report should be taken with a grain of salt considering the source, it claims that Apple is pushing to release the larger device sometime in 2018, or perhaps even earlier in 2017, which lines up with last week’s report.

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When Apple signed an exclusive deal to use the superstrong alloy liquidmetal way back in 2010, there was a lot of speculation about how Apple might use it. The only immediate answer we saw was in the SIM ejection tool supplied with iPhones.

While some had expected Apple to use liquidmetal for product casings, the high cost of the material seemed to rule that out, at least in the short-term. There’s also been no sign of the super long-lasting batteries some had suggested.

But Apple clearly does have a use for it beyond SIM eject tools, last year renewing those exclusive rights – and a patent granted to the company today suggests one possible reason why …

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Appearing on Conan last night, Woz said that he sided with Apple in the FBI fight, first because he’s always been strong on human rights, as one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but because governments shouldn’t be able to tell manufacturers to make their products insecure at a time when security is so important.

He argued that there is absolutely no reason to think the FBI would learn anything from the iPhone in question.

They picked a lame case. They picked the lamest case you ever could […]

[For the shooters’ own phones] Verizon turned over all the phone records, all the SMS messages. So they want to take this other phone, that the two didn’t destroy, which was a work phone, and it’s so lame and worthless to expect something’s on it and get Apple to expose it.

Revealing that he had once written something that could have acted as a Macintosh virus, he said he’d thrown away every line of code because he was so scared of what might happen if the code got out …

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As Apple continues to fight a court order asking it to unlock the iPhone of one the San Bernardino gunmen, the company is also involved in a similar case in New York. Last week, a New York judge ruled that the government couldn’t force Apple to unlock a device, but now, Reuters reports that the Department of Justice is fighting the ruling and is again citing the All Writs Act as reasoning.

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Since Steven Troughton-Smith’s WWDC wish list guest post last week, I’ve been thinking about my own hopes for iOS 10 later this summer. iOS 9.3 is almost here and includes loads of new system features and even enhancements to stock apps, but as ever there’s still low hanging fruit that Apple could grab to improve iPhones and iPads. Specifically, I’d like to see at least one new feature added to each built-in app.

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Not long after Apple fixed one 1970-related iPhone glitch, a second one appears to be at work. A number of iPhone and iPad owners are tweeting screengrabs of ghost emails arriving from 1st January 1970. The emails have no sender, subject or content, and cannot be deleted, reports the Telegraph.

The good news is that this glitch doesn’t do any harm. The date is simply the Unix equivalent of zero, so the iOS Mail app would default to this if for some reason the correct date and time were missing, as one Reddit user explained …

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The battle between the FBI and Apple continues to be played out in the media. On the same day that Apple SVP Craig Federighi said that the FBI wanted to create a weakness that could be used by hackers and criminals, NYPD’s head of counter-terrorism weighed in during a radio interview. The Daily News quotes John Miller accusing Apple of providing aid to murderers, among other things.

I still don’t know what made [Apple] change their minds and decide to actually design a system that made them not able to aid the police. You are actually providing aid to the kidnappers, robbers and murderers.

He cited the same quote used by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance during the Congressional hearing to support this contention, that a criminal described iOS 8 as ‘a gift from God’ …

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IDC’s latest quarterly mobile phone tracker contains a mix of good news and bad for Apple. It starts by noting that 2015 was a fantastic year for the company in terms of both sales numbers and average selling price.

2015 was a tremendous year for Apple and the iPhone as shipments hit a new record of 231.5 million for growth of 20.2% over 2014, which was nearly double that of the overall smartphone market. More importantly, Apple was able to grow its ASP from $663 in 2014 to $713 in 2015.

Things get tougher this year, it suggests, forecasting flat sales for the year (or a drop of 0.1% if we wanted to pretend that forecasts could ever be that accurate) …

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According to a new report Chinese news organization Nikkei, Apple is currently planning to introduce the first iPhone with an OLED display in 2017. In the past, it has been rumored that Apple was aiming to use OLED technology by 2018 or 2019, but today’s report claims that Apple is ahead of schedule and plans to ship an OLED iPhone next year.

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Reuters reports that both Republican and Democratic party members of the House Judiciary Committee support Apple’s view that Congress, not the courts, should decide the FBI case – and plan to file a legal brief to say so. The committee is responsible for overseeing the administration of justice within federal courts, and most of its members have a legal background.

Members of the House Judiciary Committee are considering filing a “friend of the court” brief in Apple’s encryption dispute with the U.S. government to argue that the case should be decided by Congress and not the courts, five sources familiar with the matter said […]

They said the brief would come from individual committee members of both Republican and Democratic parties but not the judiciary committee itself. Reuters could not determine which members were likely to be included … 

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