Apple’s iPhone battery replacement program could cause the company to lose out on millions of new iPhone sales, according to analysts at Barclays.
It was revealed last month that the company intentionally throttles CPU speeds on some iPhones with older batteries to provide an overall better experience. Apple has offered $29 battery replacements to make up for it, but that might be bad news for its bottom line.
Maybe you got a new iPhone or iPad for Christmas. And now you must deal with offloading your old device. (Thanks a lot, Santa.)
You can give away your old iPhone, or sell it, but before you do either of those you need to do a little prep work. Today we’ll see how to find out how much your old iPhone or iPad is worth, and then how to make it safe to sell.
Dropping your iPhone may crack it, but the most likely way to ruin the screen is to scratch it. You might drop your iPhone into your bag and let it rattle around with your keys. You may absent-mindedly slip some change into your dedicated iPhone pants pocket. Or your significant other might pick up your week-old iPhone and a nail file in the same hand, gouging the screen so badly that the scratches are all you’ll ever see from then on.
To prevent this, you should get an iPhone screen protector. Here are the best you can buy.
2017 was a pretty damn good year for the world’s most profitable tech company.
Apple did much more than rake in more cash than any company this year. Cupertino also pushed out its most impressive product lineup ever, laid the groundwork for the future of augmented reality, moved into a new spaceship campus, battled other tech giants and got tossed into the political spotlight.
Apple dominated the tech scene in 2017 more than any other company. Here’s a recap of some of the year’s most memorable Apple moments.
Thanks to batterygate, the good news is that Apple will now switch out the battery in your old iPhone for $29 instead of $79, a price so cheap it would be crazy not to do it. But how do you take care of that new battery to stop it going bad? The truth is, the lithium ion batteries in phones and notebook computers have a finite life. But you can prolong that life with a few easy tricks.
Apple’s decision to throttle CPU speeds on iPhones with older batteries isn’t a feature its competition is eager to copy.
Both Samsung and LG have come out with statements today saying that none of their phones use similar power management tactics. Their claims echo other Android makers Motorola and HTC who made the same claim yesterday.
Apple has been the subject of multiple class action lawsuits since admitting that it purposely throttles the speed of older iPhones. However, no lawsuit is quite as big as one that’s brewing in South Korea — where nearly 67,000 iPhone users have applied to join a suit against Apple.
The number of potential plaintiffs reportedly doubled over the course of Friday — from 34,000 applicants in the morning to 66,800 by the end of the working day, claims law firm Hannuri Law.
Apple has offered iPhone customers yet another apology for intentionally slowing down the CPU on some older iPhone models in order to increase overall performance.
In a letter to customers this afternoon, Apple explained that it added a feature in iOS 10.1.2 that successfully reduced the occurrence of unexpected shutdowns on iPhones. Apple was able to do so by lowering CPU performance so that it drew less power from older batteries, but the company is now offering an olive branch to customers: cheap battery replacements.
An Italian clothing company going by the name of “Steve Jobs” has won its long-standing legal battle with Apple for the right to sell jeans with Jobs’ name on them.
South Korea’s broadcasting and telecom regulator, the Korea Communications Commission, wants an explanation from Apple as to why it purposely slowed down old iPhones.
“We are hoping to get some answers on whether Apple intentionally restricted the performance of old iPhones and tried to hide this from customers,” the KCC said in a statement.
Focusrite’s iTrack One Pre might be the ultimate portable recording gadget for musicians. It’s a little cube that fits in a pocket, but that packs in connections for a microphone and a guitar, as well as a port for charging the iPad or iPhone you connect to. It can even supply Phantom Power to a microphone, and has it’s own gain (“volume,” kinda) knob.
Apple’s pretty darn good when it comes to advertising, and 2017 was no exception. Whether it was Portrait mode, AirPods or the iPhone X, creatives working on Apple ads found new and exciting ways to sell us on Cupertino’s latest innovations.
Check out our picks for the year’s best Apple ads below.
Apple has reportedly shifted half of its baseband modem chipsets for iOS devices to Intel from Qualcomm, and is now considering shifting additional orders to Taiwanese manufacturer MediaTek.
The news comes at a time when hostilities between Apple and former manufacturer Qualcomm continue to heat up, with no signs that they will come to a close soon.
Well that didn’t take long! Within a day of Apple acknowledging that it’s software updates cause older iPhone models to slow down, Apple has been hit with not one, but two class action lawsuits from folks outraged that it would behave in this way.
Both suits are asking for unspecified damages from the company.
According to reliable Apple analyst KGI Securities’ Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple will focus on increasing the iPhone’s battery capacity for both the 2019 and 2020 models.
Kuo claims that Apple’s semiconductor manufacturing processes and substrate-like printed circuit boards will enable it to create the required space in its handsets for these larger batteries. He also suggests that Apple will opt for new “superior” radio frequency printed circuit board (RFPCB) batteries.
Does your iPhone seem to get slower and slower as it grows older? Well, according to Apple, that is exactly what’s supposed to happen.
Many iPhone users have long suspected that Apple throttles performance of aging iPhones. The popular theory is that Apple does so to entice users to upgrade. However, Apple says there are really good performance reasons behind the practice.
If you’re traveling to see family this Christmas, then you may like the Kingston MobileLite G3, which is — amongst other things — a wireless SD card reader that lets you load and save any files you like. Unlike Apple’s own SD card reader, which only works with video and photos, the MobileLite can read any file you want, and then hand it off to any app that can open it.
Not only that, but the MobileLite also works with USB drives, and can juice your iPhone with its built-in 5,400 mAh battery.
Samsung Display will continue churning out OLED displays for Apple in 2018, with a reported 180 – 200 million flexible OLED iPhone panels scheduled to ship next year, a new report claims.
That’s around 4x the estimated 50 million OLED panels that Samsung supplied Apple with in 2017, which suggests that Apple is planning on expanding its number of OLED handsets in the new year.
What would happen if you took an electric guitar, made it as thick as an acoustic guitar, and stuffed the extra space not with boring old air, but with speakers and an electronic brain that works with your iPhone?
Then, you might put in a cutout on the guitar top to hold that iPhone, and a rechargeable battery to power it all. If you did all that, then you’d have invented the Fusion Guitar.
Apple fans and enthusiastic gadget reviewers will ultimately remember 2017 as the year of a reinvented iPhone. But as the year draws to an end, Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller has a few other things on his mind, such as delays in releasing the company’s first smart speaker and a “bad week” of software bugs and security holes.
Apple has raised the price of many iPhone handsets in India, following last week’s increase in import duties on the new handset.
In new rules announced last week, the cost of importing smartphones to India was raised from 10 to 15 percent. As we noted at the time, Apple’s choices were to either raise the price of iPhones in India, or to eat some of the cost itself in order to keep pricing competitive. It seems that Apple did some combination of the two — since prices have been increased an average of 3.5 percent.
Apple manufacturer Foxconn is planning to adopt artificial intelligence image recognition systems for quality control in its factories, a new report claims.
The tech could help identify faulty circuit boards or other components, thereby improving Foxconn’s efficiency when it comes to assembling devices. The AI system was developed by Andrew Ng, a machine learning expert who has previously headed up major projects for both Google and Baidu.
Apple may be keen to grow its business in India, but it’s certainly not getting any favors from the government.
In a new ruling, it’s been announced that the import tax paid on smartphones is being raised from 10 to 15 percent in a decision that will hurt Apple’s business in the country. Unless Apple absorbs the cost itself, this will make its iPhones more expensive at a time when it is desperate to get more handsets into customers’ hands.
The iPad has many, many amazing effects apps for making music, and several high-level apps just for emulating guitar amplifiers and effects pedals. But what if you just want to plug in and play a song, and have your guitar sound just like the one on the record? That’s exactly what Tonebridge is for. Under the hood, this simulator app is as powerful as the others, but it’s way, way simpler to use.
Whereas most apps present a range or virtual pedals and amps, Tonebridge is based around songs. You fire it up, plug in your guitar, and search for the song you want to play. The app loads up the sound of the song, and you can play along. The app is impressive, nailing the tomes of pretty much any song you ask for, without any tweaking necessary.
But now, with the latest Tonebridge release, you can also dig in to the settings that used to sit behind the scenes. Let’s take a look.
Apple’s is pushing to make Face ID as ubiquitous as Touch ID with its latest video that shows how the iPhone X makes Apple Pay even easier.
Because Apple removed the home button, activating Apple Pay on the iPhone X is a bit different than other iPhones. In the company’s new how-to video, Apple guides iPhone X owners through to process of making payments in stores.
Here’s how to do it: