An Apple museum could be made of just the items currently up for bid at a single auction. There’s a fully functional Apple-1, an Apple Lisa 1, some technical notes handwritten by Steve Jobs, an original iPhone still sealed in the plastic and much, more.
Many of these items are expected to bring in big bucks.
Apple is having a major outage of its online services. No less than 29 of them are reporting major problems, including the App Store, Apple TV+, Apple Music, Podcasts, and some iCloud services.
So it’s not just you. Stop rebooting your computer trying to fix it.
Update: Apple was able to quickly fix some of these, so the current total is eight services still having problems.
Update 2: All problems with Apple online services have now been resolved.
The new Mophie Powerstation Pro AC is for anyone who has multiple devices they need to charge on the go, and not just phones and tablets. The 27,000mAh external battery includes four charging ports, including an AC socket.
Mophie also introduced updated versions of its more basic Powerstation and Powerstation XL offerings on Thursday. These pack 10,000mAh and 20,000mAh, respectively.
★★★★★
The earliest Macintosh models used an iconic design — one that many longtime Mac users like me feel nostalgic about. The Shargeek Retro 67 is a salute to those early Macs that’s useful, not just decorative.
It’s a palm-size wall charger that pumps up to 67 watts through a trio of USB-C ports. With it, you can make a Macintosh juice up your iPhone and MacBook.
As someone who still has a Mac from the 1980s, it was a delight to test the Retro 67.
★★★★☆
The OWC Thunderbolt Go Dock was designed to be taken on trips, which is unusual for a hub that uses this extremely fast connection standard. While portable, it still has room for eleven ports in a range useful types, including Thunderbolt 4 (of course), USB-A, HDMI, USB-C and more.
I put the dock through a series of real-world tests to see how well it performs.
TSMC can now make 3nm processors, and Apple is all in. Literally all in — it’s reportedly buying the Taiwanese foundry’s complete output of 3nm chips.
This will be in the form of the upcoming Apple A17 and M3 processors, which are expected to both be made with the new process. It will make them faster and more energy efficient.
A decision by the U.S. International Trade Commission to block Apple Watch imports reportedly received a go-ahead from the Biden administration.
That would be a devastating decision, except that the ITC’s ruling is based on Apple Watch violating patents owned by AliveCor, and the U.S. Patent Office has ruled those are invalid. AliveCor is appealing, though.
Apple once again tops Fortune‘s list of the most admired companies in the world. It’s an honor Cupertino earned many times before. “For the 16th consecutive year, Apple finishes first in our annual ranking of corporate reputation,” noted Fortune.
Other tech giants that made the top 10 include Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet/Google.
OtterBox is known for its very protective iPhone cases, and its new OtterGrip Symmetry Series case adds a twist: a pop-up handle. Surprisingly, this doesn’t interfere with MagSafe wireless charging.
The design was good enough to win an Innovations Award at CES 2023 in January, and the case is now available to order.
Remember Car Key digital car keys? Possibly not. Because ever since Apple announced the feature — which would let users unlock and start their cars with iPhone or Apple Watch — in 2020, it’s gone essentially nowhere. But a new Car Keys Tests application seems to indicate that the company wants to make its virtual car key system more widely available.
For that, it needs the help of automakers. The new app is part of that drive.
iPhone users in six additional countries have access to a tool intended to protect children from sexual predators. The countries now getting access to Communication Safety in Messages are in Europe, Asia and elsewhere.
The optional feature warns kids if they receive or attempt to send photos containing nudity.
If you only brought $50,000 to an auction for an original 2007 iPhone then you didn’t bring enough money. It’s an unusually valuable object because the handset is still sealed in the original packaging, and the item went for quite a bit above the auction estimate.
The winning bidder ended up paying $63,356 for the factory-sealed iPhone.
Shrinking is racking up a streak as one of the most popular shows on any streaming service. The Apple TV+ comedy starring Jason Segel and Harrison Ford sits on the top 10 list for a third week in a row.
The hilarious ongoing series is about a struggling therapist who throws out the psychological rulebook and tells his clients what he really thinks they should do.
Apple finally seeded to developers iOS 16.4 beta 1 and macOS 13.3 beta 1 on Thursday, followed by releasing public beta versions on Friday. The same goes for the initial betas of iPadOS 16.4, watchOS 9.4 and tvOS 16.4.
The wait for new betas has been much longer than usual. The last round of new prerelease versions was in mid-January.
The new betas bring in a collection of new emoji, an improvement for Apple Pencil, a better way for devs to work with betas, and more changes.
Farmside is a farming simulator that escapes the biggest problem with the genre: nagging in-app purchases. The game is on Apple Arcade which doesn’t allow games to pester players for money.
Plant then harvest crops, raise animals and more in the new title that’s playable on a variety of Apple devices, including iPhone and Mac.
Unconfirmed reports about design changes coming in the iPhone 15 Pro took concrete form as CAD drawings of Apple’s next handset supposedly leaked from a Chinese accessory maker.
These help confirm rumored features like USB-C and the somewhat curvier design.
According to official data from Apple, 81% of all iPhones released in the past four years are running some version of iOS 16. That’s a vastly higher percentage than Android users have installed the latest OS update from Google.
But iPad users upgrade at a far lower rate than iPhone users. Only 53% of Apple tablets released in the last four years have iPadOS 16.
Imagine getting a text from a friend and your iPhone reads it to you in your friend’s voice. Rather than a recording, their speech would be simulated from a voice model.
That’s the goal of a patent Apple submitted recently.
The Tetris movie isn’t about falling blocks. Instead, the Apple TV+ film is a thriller about how the hugely popular game was brought out of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
The trailer clearly shows the struggle an entrepreneur goes through to convince a deeply suspicious communist regime to allow Tetris out of the country.
We can be sure Apple isn’t ignoring the folding phone market, even though the company is showing no direct signs of making an iPhone Fold. There’s plenty of indirect evidence, including patent filings that show handsets with foldable screens.
Apple received a new patent approval that shows it’s still thinking about a folding iPhone.
Earlier reports that Apple’s VR/AR headset will launch this spring were apparently overly optimistic — the latest leak points to a debut at the company’s annual developers conference in June.
If so, it’s likely to overshadow the new iOS and macOS versions also coming at WWDC23. But that probably would have happened even if the device had been unveiled months earlier, as it’ll include a new operating system for third-party developers to write applications for.
TSMC is going large with its Arizona plant. The Taiwanese company that makes processors for almost every type of Apple device committed itself to putting $3.5 billion into its U.S. subsidiary. And that’s only part of the eventual cost.
Apple has already promised to use chips made at the plant.
Qualcomm, the chipmaker that supplies the 5G modems in all iPhones, on Wednesday unveiled the X75, its next-generation modem that will be the first to support 5G Advanced. This emerging cellular-wireless standard will give a speed boost to cellular-wireless networks and make mobile VR/AR more practical.
The X75 probably will be used in the iPhone 16 when it launches in 2024.
Apple TV+’s star-studded limited series Extrapolations is set in a near future where the chaotic effects of climate change have become embedded into everyone’s everyday lives.
The trailer for the series gives a dark look at what the end of the century could look like.
Apple TV+ subscribers can enjoy a collection of half a dozen classic romantic comedies added to the streaming service just in time for Valentine’s Day.
The list includes Pretty Woman, Never Been Kissed and more.