Opinion pieces & commentary

We’ve this morning seen claimed moulds for this year’s iPhone line-up, and once more the triangular camera arrangement inside the square camera bump is coming under fire.

People have been criticising it ever since we first saw renders of the claimed design back in January.

That’s incredibly ugly.

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

No. Just no.

We’re seeing more of the same today …

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Apple has now made an official statement confirming an earlier report that it had removed or restricted the majority of popular third-party screen time and parental control apps from the App Store.

The company did, however, deny that it was anything to do with competition with its own Screen Time app …

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Music Business Worldwide reports that Amazon is gearing up to offer a hi-res streaming music service.

We understand that Amazon is currently in discussion with various large music rights-holders regarding the upcoming launch of a high fidelity music streaming platform – and that at least one major record company has already agreed to license it.

MBW has heard this whisper from several high-placed music industry sources, who say the price of Amazon’s new tier will likely be in the region of $15 per month. It’s expected to launch before the end of 2019 …

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There has been much speculation about what led to the Apple/Qualcomm settlement at the eleventh hour.

Did Intel tell Apple it was unable to deliver 5G modems by 2020? Did Apple reach its own conclusion that Intel wasn’t up to the job? Or was there some other factor at play that mysteriously led Apple to have a change of heart about a massive lawsuit centred on Qualcomm’s business practices, despite a long history of vehemently objecting to them … ?

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Apple’s MacBook keyboard replacement program solved one problem: customers would no longer have to pay for a fix for an Apple design failure. But, as I wrote recently, it still left many of us with another one: the hassle of living without our machine for a week – even those of us fortunate enough to have a backup machine.

I called an Apple Store, and they told me they’d need it for about five days, and that’s a much bigger deal […] It’s not that it’s impossible to be without it – I managed before – but it is a major hassle. I have my key work apps and bookmarks set up on my MacBook Air, but I know from that experience that there are a zillion small things that will drive me nuts in the week I’m without the machine.

I suggested a solution, and it’s one that Apple has now implemented …

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As AirPods continue to grow in popularity, the truly wireless earbud market is also becoming increasingly crowded. Samsung, for instance, just launched the Galaxy Buds, while Apple’s Beats brand also introduced the Powerbeats Pro.

Amazon is also rumored to be planning an entry into the totally wireless earbuds market with a focus on sound quality. But can they compete with AirPods?

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Apple has always ‘thought different’ when it comes to its retail stores. The company presents them as places people can go to experience the products beyond just buying them. Places where you can go to get help, whether it is a hardware fault or something you can’t figure out how to do. And somewhere you can go to learn how to get the most from your Apple products, or to get inspired about using them in creative ways.

Ensuring that the stores live up to these lofty ideals is trickier, however, and we’re seeing increasing kick-back against one of Apple’s more idealistic visions for its latest flagship stores: ‘town squares‘ …

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What lessons could – and should – Apple learn from the AirPower debacle? Clearly, lessons do need to be learned; this was a massive embarrassment. But I also think it’s important that the company doesn’t over-react.

Apple has a long history of announcing products before they are ready, with often lengthy delays before customers are able to get their hands on them. And that’s one area where people can’t say it would never have happened under Steve Jobs …

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On a recent episode of Mac Power Users, Stephen Hackett and David Sparks were looking at the iPad as a laptop replacement. I felt like it was one of the most refreshing discussions of the iPad and iOS that I had heard in a while. They looked at things about the iPad that give them joy and things that do not. The show got me thinking about the history of iOS on the iPad, and where things got stagnant. For me, the iPad as a device became stagnant around the time of the iPhone 6 Plus debut. The reality is that the iPhone has gotten better about handling iPad tasks a lot faster than the iPad has vs. a macOS powered laptop. Since then, iOS on the iPad hasn’t changed dramatically outside of how multitasking works. If you want to listen to a great discussion about the good and bad parts of the iPad lifestyle, I would give this episode a listen. As I think about the future of the iPad, I have come to the realization that iOS 13 on the iPad will be the most important release to date.

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After announcing the upcoming Apple Card at yesterday’s “It’s show time” event, I got to thinking about how Apple has never offered a non-folio wallet case for its iPhones. While I’m eager for a truly wallet-less future, we’re not there yet and I think a lot of folks will opt for a physical Apple Card to go along with the digital default. Here’s my pitch for a slim first-party wallet case from Apple.

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I have to say yesterday’s Apple event was something of a snoozefest for me.

Now, I fully acknowledge that this is partly down to my particular tastes. I’m not a TV guy, for starters: I haven’t owned a television in 20 years, and while I do have a Netflix account, it’s borderline whether or not I actually use it enough to justify even the small cost. So it didn’t really matter what Apple announced there; it wasn’t going to interest me.

Same thing with gaming. I have X-Plane on my iPad, and use that briefly a few times a week, and three or four other games I play maybe a few times a year. I basically don’t have the gaming gene.

But while I could say to Apple ‘It’s not you, it’s me,’ the truth is, it is partly Apple too …

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I’m not sure whether there’s a typical lost iPhone story, but the tale of how I came to leave my iPhone behind on Monday evening, outdoors, several miles from home, is a slightly convoluted one.

I should like to note that no alcohol was involved – only tea …

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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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