Opinion pieces & commentary

Apple finally launched the long-awaited second-generation AirPods. These offer a new H1 chip which boost talk-time and speed up switching between devices, but the headline features are hands-free Hey Siri and … a wireless charging case.

The latter – also available as a standalone accessory for existing AirPods owners – has been a long time coming. The thinking until now is that Apple was waiting until it could finally get AirPower working, so it could announce the products together, but it hasn’t done so.

The big question is whether AirPower is coming tomorrow as a separate launch …. ?

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The iPad mini has long had a rather odd position in the model lineup, but things got weirder still with the new iPad mini launched today.

The smallest iPad in the line-up originally had to try to satisfy the needs of two very different types of customers. There were those who bought it because it was, at the time, the cheapest iPad. In particular, the combination of relatively low-cost and diminutive size made it a popular choice for kids.

But there were also those for whom it was never about price …

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When it comes to the smartwatch market, there’s Apple and then everyone else. The most recent data suggests that the Apple Watch has as many sales as all other smartwatch models put together. Garmin smartwatches fall into fourth place.

Apple has a sizable lead with a 50 percent share of the smartwatch market […]

Those shipment numbers put Apple at the top of the smartwatch industry, with Fitbit in a distant second at 5.5 million units shipped in all of 2018. Samsung is in third with 5.3 million units shipped, followed by Garmin at 3.2 million.

But unusually, Apple doesn’t offer the most expensive model among mainstream brands …

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US senator and 2020 presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren made waves on Friday when she announced proposals to break up big tech – including Apple’s App Store.

Her initial focus was on Amazon, Facebook and Google, but Warren later clarified that one of her proposals would apply to Apple too …

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Apple has long been the undisputed profit king of the smartphone industry, taking by far the largest slice of the total profit pie. Indeed, at one point Apple was – by one admittedly eccentric measure – taking more than 100% of the profits, when factoring in loss-making brands.

iPhones have also consistently been the most expensive smartphones, discounting tacky bejewelled specials like Vertu. Even when Samsung theoretically matched or exceeded Apple’s pricing for its flagships, its offerings were usually steeply discounted 2-3 months after launch.

But all that is changing …

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If you thought Siri had its haters, that’s nothing compared to the comments many owners of Samsung smartphones make about the Korean company’s voice assistant, Bixby. Samsung then compounded the problem by introducing a dedicated Bixby hardware button on several devices.

That was quite possibly Samsung’s worst ever smartphone idea: take a feature many of your customers hate, and then use up space on your devices to activate it. Oh, and position it directly beneath the volume rocker, where it’s almost guaranteed to be pressed accidentally …

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We got one step closer yesterday to a foldable iPhone when Samsung’s real-world folding smartphone was unveiled on stage: the Galaxy Fold.

Samsung first promised a foldable smartphone way back in 2013, when it was complete fiction. It followed this by teasing a prototype device in November last year. We didn’t get much of a look at it, and I had my own suspicions about the timing of that preview.

But yesterday, Samsung announced that the Fold will go on sale in April …

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We learned a little more today about Apple’s plans for Marzipan, its UIKit that will make it easy for developers to port iOS apps to the Mac.

Today’s report suggests that the project will be rolling out a little more slowly than expected, with an SDK for third-party apps launching at this year’s WWDC – but only for iPad apps …

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The venerable iPad mini 4 still has its fans, despite its now somewhat odd position in the iPad line-up: more expensive than the 9.7-inch iPad, yet smaller and significantly less capable.

Smaller can be a benefit as well as a drawback, of course. Some prefer the portability of the mini, and many parents like them as devices for younger kids, as they are easier to handle and thus less likely to get damaged by a fall.

But the ‘less capable’ part is because the iPad mini hasn’t been updated since 2015 …

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I’ve been calling on Apple to bring back the 17-inch MacBook Pro for many years now. Sometimes there’s just no substitute for physical screen size when it comes to things like photo and video editing, and even in more mundane use, you can get a significant productivity boost from having multiple windows visible at the same time.

I’ve suggested before that 14- and 16-inch machines might be the sweet-spot, and noted Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo yesterday suggested that the larger of the two may well be on the way …

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With iPhone revenue flat despite higher average selling prices, Apple is increasingly looking to Services to provide future revenue growth. It’s therefore not surprising that the company would be doing everything it can to maximize those revenues.

But if a WSJ report is correct, that Apple is seeking a 50% revenue cut for an upcoming subscription news service, the company could be shooting itself in the foot …

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There are many things to love about Apple Stores.

The designs are great. Either funky and modern, with loads of glass and natural light, or a respectful yet contemporary conversion of a classical building.

You can freely play with the products, without any sales pressure. If you have questions, there will generally be someone who knows the answer …

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The revelation that a major FaceTime bug can effectively turn your Apple devices into a hot mic, allowing a caller to hear or even see you before you pick up, would be a massive embarrassment no matter which company was involved. It’s an absolutely crazy security fail.

But when that company is Apple – which has been ceaselessly pushing privacy of late – it becomes so cringeworthy we’re going to have to invent a whole new scale just to measure it …

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Apple’s HomeKit seemed to be the star of the show at the Consumer Electronics Show this year, with a wide range of home-based gadgets — TVs, ceiling fans, outdoor sensors, light panels, a screen-based hub, 4K security cameras, thermostats and more — making headlines.

The HomeKit ecosystem is growing, and it looks like prices may even begin inching downward as well — but that’s not enough, and not fast enough either. As Bradley Chambers wrote in an opinion piece, Apple is leaving a lot of potential on the table by relying solely on third parties to create home-based gadgets.

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One of the biggest shake-ups we’ve seen in the iOS user-interface was the replacement of skeuomorphism – making things look like real-life objects – with the complete opposite in iOS 7. Where once we had realistic looking 3D representations, we instead got a ‘flat’ UI which goes out of its way to remain 2D.

While some feel that skeuomorphism looks old-fashioned these days, the approach still has its fans even now – and Apple has shown signs of beginning to adopt a new take on the look using something called anisotropism …

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Apple made two surprise announcements recently: one before the holidays, the other afterwards. Both point to the full extent of the company’s plans to transform itself into a very different company.

The first announcement was that Apple Music would, for the first time, be fully supported on third-party speakers. Although available as an app on Android phones, the only speaker on which Apple’s streaming music service was natively available was its own HomePod …

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Yesterday saw renders of what Digit claims to be a first look at the 2019 iPhone, and 9to5Mac readers weren’t impressed by the look.

That’s incredibly ugly.

No offence to the person that created that, but ewww.

No. Just no.

This is a horrendous design!

But while I agree about the aesthetics, I would like to see Apple add cameras to the iPhone …

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I argued almost exactly two years ago that we were approaching the point at which Apple might have to think the unthinkable on iPhone pricing.

Apple cannot afford to have anything resembling a sense of entitlement when it comes to customers at the premium end of the market. Leaving aside those geeks who have their own technical or philosophical reasons for favoring Android, it’s largely been the case to date that anyone who can afford to buy an iPhone does so almost automatically. That fact is testament to Apple’s extraordinary marketing prowess.

But players like Google, Huawei, Xiaomi, Lenovo and OnePlus are learning fast […] So while Apple’s current dominance of the premium end of the market gives it a massive head-start, it can’t count on forever remaining the automatic choice. It will need to learn to compete on a slightly more level playing field as its competitors continue to up their game.

Yesterday’s news suggests that crunch time may now have arrived …

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In what is now an annual tradition, I’m offering my end-of-year report card on Apple’s 2018 hardware performance. What the company did well, what it did less well, and what it failed to do altogether.

We’ve already rounded-up everything Apple announced during the course of the year, so let’s look now at what I consider to be the highlights and lowlights …

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It’s almost accepted as a truism now that Apple products are getting more expensive – and indeed, there’s plenty of data to support that contention.

Go back to 2014, for example, and the average selling price (ASP) of an iPhone was $634. Fast-forward to 2018, and it’s $898.

Headline prices of Macs and iPads might suggest the same is true there, but that’s not necessarily the case …

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Regular readers will know that I was a huge fan of the 17-inch MacBook Pro. The moment it was discontinued, I rushed out to buy the very last model so that I could keep it for as long as possible.

Way back in 2014, I argued that it was time to bring it back. That didn’t happen, of course, and two years later I’d come to terms with the fact that the era of user-upgradable MacBook Pro models was at an end.

But that wasn’t there only reason I loved the 17-inch model: there was also that gorgeous screen size. And LG’s latest laptop shows just how lovely a modern take on a 17-inch MacBook Pro could be …

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