Apple just put its foot down about supporting its latest tech. Starting in July, every update submitted to the App Store must take full advantage of the iPhone X’s Super Retina display. They also must be built with the iOS 11 SDK.
Support for the unusually-shaped iPhone X screen has been happening gradually, but expect a rush in the coming weeks.
The fourth beta of the next versions of iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS just became available for developers. Apple has apparently reached the point where it’s not adding new features to these, but is fixing bugs.
It’s possible features could be removed from the various betas, though.
Thanos isn’t just appearing in theaters everywhere, he’s also showing up in Fortnite. The villain of Avengers: Infinity War is crossing over into one of the most popular iOS games for a short time.
Even better, one player in each session transforms into Thanos to wield the Infinity Gauntlet.
Scotty Allen loves to tinker. He followed up on his recent project manually expanding the storage capacity of his iPhone with a new trick: extracting an iPhone memory chip and converting it into a USB drive.
To be clear, Allen isn’t suggesting this is practical. Buying a USB drive is cheaper and vastly easier. But he sure seems to have fun doing it.
iOS 12 is right around the corner, but iPad users should be thinking longer term. It’s iOS 13 “Yukon” in 2019 that’s expected to bring more new features to Apple’s tablet.
At the top of the list of the ability to work with multiple windows from the same application side-by-side. This would allow the user to, for example, have two Pages documents open next to each other.
Just in time for May the Fourth-be-with-you, Star Wars: Jedi Challenges added multiplayer lightsaber battles so you can take on your friends in virtual reality combat.
Of course, doing so requires a couple of $150 AR helmets and lightsabers. But still.
Google’s service making its accounts uncommonly secure has been extended to iOS native apps. This is only for people who carry around really sensitive information and who therefore expect their iPhone or iPad to come under sophisticated attack.
Starting today, the Advanced Protection Program supports Apple Mail, Calendar, and Contacts. Naturally, this is only for those who connect these iOS apps to Google accounts.
Reviews of Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery don’t agree whether it’s a good iOS game, but all say it’s vastly too expensive. It’s actually free to download, but playing the game essentially requires buying expensive power-ups.
But now developer Jam City may have changed course because reports are coming in that the cost of power-ups has dropped by up to 80 percent.
There’s no doubt who’s top dog in the global wearables market. Just over 4 million Apple Watches shipped during the first quarter of this year. That’s nearly double the number of Fitbits shipped.
The performance of Apple’s wearable was also up dramatically when compared to the same period of last year.
Apply now for the 2018 class of the Apple Developer Academy to learn to create iOS apps. And did we mention you get to live in Naples? And it’s free?
This isn’t a basic bootcamp. In addition to learning Swift programming and user interface design, students are taught how to be an entrepreneur.
The butterfly keyboard in recent MacBooks draws frequent complaints. And these have now escalated to the point where an online petition is requesting that Apple recall every MacBook Pro released since 2016.
These laptops are super-slim, and so are their keyboards. Reducing the thickness left room for very little key travel, resulting in accusations that even a small speck of dust underneath one of the keys can cause it to stop functioning.
iPhone fast charging is possible with the 2017 models, but it’s a seriously underutilized feature because the devices don’t come with the right adapters. But Apple is reportedly going to ship the 2018 iPhone models with the adapter and cable needed to get a 100% charge much quicker.
It’s one of the puzzles of last year’s devices. They support USB-C fast charging, but come with USB-A adapters that take much longer.
The total number of smartphones shiped worldwide in the first quarter of the year declined, but Apple was immune, experiencing a small increase. Its share of the global market grew as a result.
Arch-rival Samsung was hit though, seeing a small decrease year over year despite the launch of its new flagship models.
Apple and other tech companies are fighting back against a newly proposed method for giving law enforcement access to encrypted smartphones, bypassing users’ passcodes.
The iPhone backdoor proposal comes from Ray Ozzie, who was once chief technical officer at Microsoft, and its chief software architect.
Fitbit wants Google’s help to turn its fitness trackers into health monitors. The wearables maker will use Google’s cloud solutions to tie directly to users’ electronic medical records.
The real goal, of course, is to help Fitbit be more competitive with arch-rival Apple Watch.
Analysts have been extremely pessimistic about the iPhone X, with almost daily predictions that Apple’s top-of-the-line model was a flop. And they were all dead wrong. Tim Cook just said the iPhone X has been Apple’s best-selling model for every week since it launched, and that sales of all the company’s phones grew last quarter.
How did the analysts get it so wrong? Here’s what probably happened.
A small company that makes dual cameras for cellphones claims Apple is infringing on several of its patents. The Israeli startup says it showed Apple prototypes for a miniature telephone lens, and Apple used them to create its own.
According to Corephotonics, the iPhone X, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone 7 Plus all use technology for which it holds patents.
Microsoft has good news for users of Mac, iPad, and iPhone: there are improvements in Office 365 for all of you.
Word for Mac now uses neural machine translation to convert text between 11 different languages. This AI system is intended to produce more accurate results.
You’ve had a couple of cold ones, then head to your car. Suddenly, your iPhone starts shrieking out an alert. It’s telling you that you’re too impaired to get behind the wheel.
This is the goal of AlcoGait, which uses a smarthone’s built-in sensors to monitor the way the user is walking. AI is used to detect if the person’s gait indicates they’re not up to driving.
A couple of new renders and a video from a reliable source show what might be the next-generation iPhone SE. The device shown looks a lot like the earlier version, but updated with some of Apple’s newest tech.
Most notably, the Home button is gone, being replaced by a screen cutout with Face ID sensors.
A job post shows Apple is hiring an engineer to lead a team designing 5G modems. This may be mean that the company is going to stop outsourcing these wireless chips.
Apple currently sources its LTE modems from Qualcomm, but there have been reports that it’s working with Intel on next-generation modems. Maybe the iPhone maker decided to kick Intel to the curb too.
Do you get your iPhone service from Sprint? Not for much longer. The third and fourth largest U.S. carriers just announced they’re merging. But the plan to join Sprint and T-Mobile is already drawing significant criticism.
The combined company will be called T-Mobile, and will be headed by John Legere, T-Mobile’s current CEO. That’s assuming the $59 billion deal gets approved by government regulators.
Just about all of us have a few classic Apple devices we just can’t bear to get rid of. But Hap Plain takes it to the next level. And beyond. He collects and sells Apple prototypes for top dollar.
He has about 258. And his collection is a more than just a history of the company. It’s a testament all the effort needed to create the great Apple desktops, PDAs, and phones of the past.
There’s been a lot of pessimism about the iPhone X lately, but a market research firm says that this device was the top selling smartphone in the world by a wide margin in February.
The company also says Apple had all four of the best selling smartphones globally that month.
The good news is that someone managed to create an iOS 11.3 jailbreak. The bad news is that the person who managed the trick probably won’t turn it into anything the general public can use.
While this once would have left a significant percentage of the iPhone community tearing its hair out, these days jailbreaking is almost dead.