Tech Industry

Ever wonder where most of the world’s knock-off Apple products and electronics come from? Recently, I took a trip to Shenzhen in China and got to check out the madness first hand. In Shenzhen, they’ll slap an Apple logo on just about anything and try to pass it off as legitimate. Needless to say, it makes for a very comical experience…

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Last week, I wrote an article called The Top 10 Android Features Apple’s iOS 10 Should Steal, and — surprise — it turned out to be somewhat controversial. Over 120 comments reflected a wide range of opinions on the future direction of Apple’s mobile operating system, with most commenters agreeing that iOS should take some inspiration from Android, but only for the specific features they personally liked. Unfortunately, in keeping with our increasingly polarized society, a few particularly caustic Apple fanboys decided to go crazy, personally attacking fellow commenters who liked the ideas, the author who dared to suggest them (“poor old me“), and the very concept of taking any ideas whatsoever from Android.

On one hand, I understand where the fanboys are coming from. Some people just love whatever Apple releases and does, no matter what. Others are so emotionally or financially invested in Apple that any suggestion of potential improvement is perceived as an attack on the company’s well-being. But it’s hard to sympathize with people who freak out when Apple’s described as anything less than perfect. Walt Mossberg called out “cultists” for this behavior in his article, “It’s Not a Church, It’s Just an Apple Store,” naming it the Doctrine of Insufficient Adulation. Demanding unyielding praise is nonsensical, and ultimately unhealthy for the Apple community as a whole. Simple statistics suggest that under 0.05% of our readers fall into cultist territory, but they’re abrasive enough to turn off the other 99.95% of readers we care about.

It’s important to understand that these hard-core fanboys aren’t just a tiny minority of all iOS users — they also have fringe views relative to the general population. Reasonable people can debate the precise numbers, but Android currently powers roughly 4/5 of the smartphones out there. It’s easy to credit aggressive Android device prices, but it’s clear that Android has features that appeal to people, too. From my perspective, it’s perfectly reasonable for iOS users to want some of Android’s features — especially if they don’t want to switch to Android devices. Yes, Apple’s a great company, and yes, iOS is a great platform, but they’re not perfect. Even if you don’t like Google, there’s room to learn (and borrow) from Android…

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There are a few new goodies for iOS developers shipping during the holiday season. Over the weekend, app analytics firm AppFigures released a cool new feature called ‘Sharable Review Cards’. Essentially, developers can curate their App Store reviews for some of their best feedback and quickly share a link to that comment for others to admire.

The cards take on the theme from the app icon, so each review card appearance matches the app it is about. In the example above, my app Bingo Machine uses a dark blue background tint, so the AppFigures Card uses the same blue for the review title. It’s a pretty cool feature for devs who want to positively promote their app on social media with actual customer testimonials.

There are also some new releases from Facebook’s Parse, the third-party cloud sync framework that Apple later aped with its own CloudKit service, with complete support for the newest Apple platforms, namely watchOS and tvOS.

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iPhones have already been used for an impressive number of medical applications. We’ve seen them used to screen for skin cancer, manage diabetes, prevent blindness, provide eye examinations and diagnose everything from sleep apnea to bipolar episodes. But the next step could be a $250 organic chemistry lab we can carry in our pocket.

The WSJ has been talking to a couple of startups working in this field, including 6SensorLabs which has a device that can – with the help of a smartphone – detect whether a food really is gluten-free.

The Nima from 6SensorLabs is an organic-chemistry lab small enough to carry in your pocket. Right now it is only good for one thing: detecting gluten in foods at minuscule concentrations, as little as 20 parts per million, the FDA’s threshold for declaring a food “gluten-free.”

The company says that this could be just the start, with future versions able to detect the bacteria that cause food poisoning …

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Earlier this week, I wrote about the surprisingly good Motorola Moto G (2nd Gen) phone I was testing at our publisher’s request, and though I wouldn’t switch from iOS to Android, the experience made plain that even a sub-$100 Android phone is competent enough today to serve as a more capable alternative to a $199 iPod touch. I’ve since been testing the $180 Moto G (3rd Gen), which is still less expensive than the lowest-end iOS device, but is faster than its predecessor, and includes still cameras rivaling Apple’s flagship iPhone 6s models. Contrary to Apple’s marketing, Android devices aren’t all bad, and $100-$200 options from major manufacturers are now delivering much better overall value than Apple’s sub-$200 devices.

Google has spent the last few years really closing Android’s overall user experience gap with iOS, while adding and polishing some features that are either Android-exclusive — or markedly better on Android than iOS. So just like Google borrowed elements of iOS to improve Android, Apple should be doing the same. Here are the top 10 features I’d pick for iOS 10 to clone…

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Apple has begun advertising the iPhone 6s to older iPhone users through the App Store, as spotted by @Dirk_Gently on Twitter. If a user browses the App Store, perhaps updating apps, with an iPhone 5s or earlier device, a modal popup may appear over the top of the view promoting the iPhone 6s as a ‘ridiculously powerful’ upgrade. Users are directed to learn more or ‘upgrade now’ which takes them to the Apple Store app to buy the new phone directly. The ad code appears to have been included alongside iOS 9.2.

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Last week Apple’s open sourcing of Swift naturally saw the spotlight thrown over Apple’s open source pages. This included a paragraph that claimed Apple was “the first major computer company to make Open Source a key part of its strategy”. Unsurprisingly, this riled some members of the developer community as being disingenuous and untrue.

So Apple has since changed the text to retract the rather outlandish statement with something a bit more muted. Although this statement is technically qualitative and open to many interpretations, Apple isn’t exactly known for its open source contributions. The page now reads as follows:

‘Open source software is at the heart of Apple platforms and developer tools, and Apple continues to contribute and release significant quantities of open source code’.

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As promised by Eddy Cue earlier in the year, Apple has now raised the limits on iTunes Match and Apple Music library for matched songs from 25,000 to 100,000 songs.

Cue had previously announced on Twitter that Apple was aiming for 100k for iOS 9 and just in time for the holidays, that promise has been fulfilled. This means users with larger music libraries can now enjoy the benefits of matching songs in the iTunes Cloud to make them available on all their devices. Matching songs gives another option for people who cannot afford the more expensive 64 GB and 128 GB iPhone models by offloading local music storage to the cloud.

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The carrier wars in the US are heating up as we head further into the winter, and that’s generally good news for consumers. Verizon is currently adding 2GB of data for new and current subscribers that upgrade to certain plans over the next few weeks. T-Mobile is targeting switchers by offering AT&T subscribers that jump carriers the chance to buy the 128GB iPhone 6s at the price of the 16GB model and save as much as $125 on financed accessories including Beats headphones and the Apple Watch. Read on for details…
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As promised earlier in the year, Apple’s Swift team has now posted source code for the Swift compiler and standard library functions and objects. Open-sourcing Swift is a big win for the developer community as it means Swift can now be setup to run on a server and many other use cases, bringing Apple programming talent and expertise beyond ‘just’ making apps iOS devices and Macs.

Making Swift open-source also gives the developer community as a whole more confidence in the language. Theoretically, if Apple ever decided to move away from Swift (which is unlikely), the language could be picked up by others and continue development and existing codebases could continue to be supported.

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Apple has opened registrations for this year’s ‘Hour of Code’ workshops, providing kids aged six and up with a free one-hour introduction to the basics of computer programming. The workshops take place at Apple Stores around the world on December 10th, and this will be the third year running that the company has offered them.

Hour of Code is a fun one-hour introduction to computer science, designed to demystify code and show that anyone can learn the basics of programming.

Like last year, the company is also holding a number of special events in support of Computer Science Education Week and Code.org … 
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AT&T subscribers who previously had unlimited data plans back in the iPhone 3G era and have managed to hang onto that plan are in for their first price increase in seven years, a source with knowledge of the matter has informed 9to5Mac.

Update: AT&T has now publicly announced the change. Additional information has been added below.

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The idea of a smart home is a long running meme in technological circles. Apple has made the biggest stride recently with HomeKit and there is now a significant ecosystem of lights, switches, and other accessories to buy for your home. That being said, smart home accessories are still novelties and quite pricey: they aren’t must-have purchases. However, this makes them great gifts for the holiday season — uncommon presents that are fun to play with and have some long-lasting usefulness. We’ve rounded up our favorite HomeKit accessories below …

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Intrepid iOS developer/hacker Hamza Sood is back, this time with a cool hack to bring 3D Touch to the iPad Pro. By hooking relevant parts of the iOS system code via a jailbreak, detailed here on GitHub, iOS turns pressure data from Apple Pencil into pressure data for 3D Touch interactions. This is neat for two reasons: iPad Pro does not normally support 3D Touch (a feature currently exclusive to iPhone 6s) and its an unorthdox use for the Apple Pencil sensors, which is generally focused on drawing and sketching. You can see the video of the hack in action after the break …

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Pebble smartwatches just got a little smarter, allowing some iPhone owners to reply to text messages directly on the watch – something that has so far been possible only on the Apple Watch.

Pebble is excited to introduce Text Reply for iOS, a beta feature making us the first non-Apple smartwatch to bring voice and text replies to our iPhone users […]

After setting things up, users can respond with a voice reply or pre-defined text to incoming items from the iOS Messages app.

There are, though, a few disclaimers … 
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T-Mobile has announced its latest “un-carrier” initiative, dubbed “Un-carrier Unwrapped.” Rather than a permanent addition to the company’s offerings, Un-carrier Unwrapped is a month-long event during which the carrier will gift its subscribers and new customers with special deals and benefits.

The first of those was announced today: unlimited LTE data for all subscribers on Simple Choice post-paid plans for the next three months.

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Apple has acknowledged the recent terrorism attacks in Paris with a commemorative ribbon on the Apple France homepage, www.apple.com/fr. The black ribbon is a sign of remembrance and mourning; Google has also added the symbol to its homepage in response to the attacks.

In addition, Apple has been contacting affected employees in French Apple retail stores to check they are safe.

Apple calling all employees in France to check they are safe… 👍

— History is a riot (@_jonasf_) November 14, 2015

So many of Apple’s products either rely on or benefit from wireless Bluetooth connectivity these days that viewing Bluetooth’s roadmap is almost like viewing features for future Apple devices and accessories. Today the Bluetooth Special Interest Group has shared details on updates planned for the wireless connectivity technology in 2016 including improvements to range, transfer speed, and smart applications. Future and potentially even current Apple devices will certainly benefit as a result.
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