Luke Dormehl - page 31

Toyota’s President Akio Toyoda has chimed in on the possibility of an Apple car, saying the automotive industry welcomes new players with “the potential to breathe [fresh] life into the auto industry and give customers a wider range of choices.”

However, he threw minor shade at new arrivals like the Cupertino tech giant, noting how much more experienced Toyota is. “After making a vehicle, I’d like them to be prepared to deal with customers and various changes for some 40 years,” Toyoda said during a Thursday press conference by the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association.

Apple contract manufacturer Wistron has reopened the iPhone factory in Karnataka, southern India. The factory was temporarily closed late last year after riots broke out over unpaid wages.

According to the Economic Times, it is currently operating with a reduced workforce of around 6,000 people. This is around half the number that it had late last year. Wistron will reportedly gradually scale back up the numbers.

After talks with potential automotive partners stalled, Cupertino could stick with its key iPhone manufacturer to produce an Apple car, a Thursday report from Bloomberg suggests.

This would mark a big change in Apple’s strategy for breaking into the auto industry. The company previously looked to hook up with an established automaker — albeit seemingly with Apple receiving top billing.

Games in the App Store are getting bigger. An average of 76% bigger over the past five years to be precise. That’s according to a new report from app analytics platform Sensor Tower.

The firm recently analyzed the average file size of the top 100 revenue-generating mobile games on the U.S. App Store for each year since 2016. This includes only the file size of the original download, and not any additional content.

Using a 1984-era Macintosh 128K and various retro tools, Pinot W. Ichwandardi painstakingly crafted a beautiful pixel art drawing of one of New York City’s most stunning skyscrapers.

Ichwandardi created his stunning image of the Flatiron Building one pixel at a time, a process he calls “pixel knitting” due to its time-intensive nature. But the incredibly detailed artwork isn’t even the point.

“The most rewarding thing from it is the process,” the 50-year-old designer told Cult of Mac.

It just goes to show that even a Mac that’s nearly 40 years old can still be used to make amazing pieces artwork. And you can buy a print of Ichwandardi’s Flatiron Building art — printed on a vintage dot-matrix printer, naturally!

The iPhone 12 mini is looking more and more like the runt of the iPhone 12 litter — and not just because of its diminutive size.

While the iPhone 12 series reportedly has been a massive hit for Apple overall, the iPhone 12 mini hasn’t been along for the ride. On Wednesday, Nikkei Asia reported that Apple is “slashing its planned production of the iPhone 12 mini for the first half of this year.”

Apple delayed plans to start mass-producing its next-gen MacBook Pro until this fall, according to a new report from Nikkei Asia. Originally, Cupertino was expected to start building the new laptops in May or June.

This MacBook Pro is widely expected to boast a new form factor and come in both 14- and 16-inch screen sizes. It is also anticipated to kill off the LED Touch Bar in favor of a row of physical keys, bring back the MagSafe charger, feature a built-in SD card reader and HDMI port, and sport a fancy mini-LED display.

In other words, it sounds like it’ll be worth the wait. But you will likely be waiting.

Apple is investing upward of 1 billion euros ($1.19 billion) in building a European Center for Chip Design in Munich, Germany. This will be used, in Apple’s (translated) words, for developing processes involving “5G and the wireless technologies of the future.”

Munich is already the location of Apple’s biggest development center in Europe. It is home to close to 1,500 engineers from 40 countries. The new initiative will see them joined by hundreds more employees.

Apple is making a minor change to its Apple Podcasts app with iOS 14.5, ditching the “Subscribe” label to one that says “Follow.”

This change reflects language used commonly on social media platforms. Moreover, “Follow” suggests that the podcast is free, while “Subscribe” implies a paid subscription. Especially as Apple moves increasingly into paid subscriptions, this wording alteration is intended to avoid confusion.

Apple has published the first details of an ongoing Apple Women’s Health Study, using the iPhone to carry out longitudinal research on menstruation.

The project, which involves a team from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, is based on data from 10,000 participants across the U.S. Users have been contributing their data using Apple’s Research app, starting late last year.

A French lobbyist group is accusing Apple of hypocrisy over new privacy measures in iOS 14, which make it harder for other companies to track users. Why? Because Apple also operates a feature called Personalized Advertising, which capitalizes on user data to display targeted ads within apps.

Want to stop Apple from targeting you with personalized ads? Here’s how you do it. (And everything else you need to know about the new complaint.)

The iPhone will get a periscopic telephoto lens in 2023, TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claims in a new research note seen by Cult of Mac.

Although Kuo doesn’t provide much in the way of details, this would greatly improve the zoom capabilities of the iPhone. Currently the best iPhone for camera zoom is the iPhone 12 Pro Max. That handset features a 2.5x optical zoom in, and 2x optical zoom out. Digital zoom goes up to 12x.

A periscope zoom could increase this significantly. For example, the 2019-era Huawei P30 Pro and Oppo Reno offer 10x zoom capabilities using a periscope lens.

Apple’s mixed reality/augmented reality headset will come with 15 camera modules, according to TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.

Kuo, who has a strong track record when it comes to reporting on Apple rumors, also suggests that it will feature “innovative biometrics,” along with the ability to detect the environment the user is positioned in at the time.

The iMac Pro is seemingly nearing the end of its natural lifespan — and good riddance to it.

In fairness, the iMac Pro was not a bad computer. It was even, technically, a pretty great one. But it epitomized an era of Mac design that may have been the most uninspired and directionless in Apple history.

BMW’s Chief Financial Officer Nicholas Peter isn’t worried about Apple’s entry into the automotive industry. Or, if he is, he’s not willing to say as much.

“I sleep very peacefully,” Peter said when asked about the rumored Apple car. “Competition is a wonderful thing — it helps motivate the others. We’re in a very strong position and we want to remain in a leading position of the industry.”

Apple revealed on Monday a new “multiyear programming partnership” with women’s rights activist and Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai to produce content for for Apple TV+.

Yousafzai will produce original programming for the streaming service, spanning drama, comedy, documentary, animation and kids’ shows.

Apple TV+ comedy Ted Lasso scored a hat trick of awards at the 2021 Critics’ Choice Awards on Sunday, garnering prizes for Best Comedy Series, Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for Hannah Waddingham and Best Actor in a Comedy Series for Jason Sudeikis.

Considering that it’s an underdog tale about a fish-out-of-water football coach struggling to adapt to the world of soccer, the fact that Ted Lasso is proving to be Apple TV+’s MVP — winning against the likes of Netflix, Hulu and CBS — seems weirdly appropriate.

Apple Watch shipments increased by 19% last year, according to a new report from Counterpoint Research. Those are respectable numbers. However, they look even better compared to the performance of other smartwatch makers like Samsung and Fitbit, whose shipments declined in 2020.

This trend runs counter to the trajectory seen with most other Apple products. Even smash hits like the iPhone and AirPods, which grew over time, gradually made up a smaller piece of the pie as rivals gobbled up market share. In the case of the Apple Watch, however, not only is Apple remaining No. 1 — with 33.9 million units reportedly shipped in 2020 — but it’s retaining its lead.

Apple will bring OLED displays to both the iPad and MacBook in 2022, according to a new report from Digitimes.

OLED (short for “organic light emitting diode”) screens offer several advantages over older technologies, including more-vibrant colors, higher contrast, thinner hardware and increased power efficiency.

Apple started issuing $500 digital vouchers to developers following the return of their Developer Transition Kit Macs.

The company introduced the custom DTK Macs last year at its Worldwide Developers Conference. As their name suggests, the hardware was intended to help developers transition their apps from Macs’ previous Intel architecture to new Apple Silicon processors.

They were offered as a one-year lease, although Apple wound up requesting them back at around the nine-month mark.

TikTok has cemented itself at the top of the App Store for yet another month, showing the seemingly unassailable dominance of the video-sharing app. According to app analytics platform Sensor Tower, TikTok was the top-grossing, non-gaming app worldwide for February 2021.

For the month, it raked in more than $110 million in user spending across both iOS and Android. That’s approaching twice what it earned in revenue that month last year, although marginally down from the $128 million it pulled in back in January.

An Australian iPhone owner whose day job is working as a scientist at the University of Melbourne is suing Apple after his iPhone X exploded in his pocket.

Robert De Rose says that he was sitting in his office in 2019, with the iPhone in his pocket, when suddenly he felt an intense pain in his thigh. He was left with second-degree leg burns after the incident.

Preorders for Crash Bandicoot’s first iOS game in a decade are now up and (endless) running.

The endless runner game, titled Crash Bandicoot: On the Run, is the famous PlayStation mascot’s first game for the iPhone since 2010’s sequel to Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D, a game that’s no longer available through the App Store. It is scheduled to hit the App Store on March 25.

The iPhone 12 looks like a monster hit for Apple, a new note to investors by research analysis firm Cowen suggests. The firm estimates that iPhone orders climbed 50% year-over-year last quarter, propelled by the enormously popular iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro models.

For the March 2021 quarter, Cowen thinks Apple will build 57 million iPhones. That’s up from the firm’s own previous prediction of 55 million.

Apple could release its first folding iPhone in the next couple of years, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says.

In a new research note to clients, seen by Cult of Mac, Kuo writes that “if Apple can solve the foldable mobile device’s key technology and mass production issues in 2021, then [it] may launch the 7.5 [to] 8-inch foldable iPhone in 2023.”