There’s one big conceptual difference between Face ID and its predecessor, Touch ID. With a fingerprint, you have to explicitly touch the home button to confirm an action. When unlocking a password-protected app, or unlocking the iPhone itself, it’s hard to do it unintentionally. But what about buying an app? The old Touch ID way is to tap the buy button, and then use your fingerprint to confirm the purchase. What happens with Face ID? How do you cancel a purchase after tapping buy? Do you look away? Close your eyes?

No. It’s much simpler than that, although much less discoverable than touching a fingerprint scanner.

We hope you didn’t spend the last of your savings on iPhone X, because you’re going to need more if you want an AirPower charger to go with it. According to one retailer, Apple’s latest accessory will be wildly expensive.

Amazon is taking a page out of Ikea’s playbook with an iOS app update today that allows users to see what furniture and other items would look like in their home.

The software company that’s taken the Macphun out of its name continues to add power to its digital imaging software.

Macphun, which will become Skylum Software next year, rolled out Luminar 2018 for Mac and PC Wednesday for pre-order.

Apple has updated its Apple Watch Series 3 battery guidelines following the rollout of watchOS 4.1 on Tuesday.

The update adds big new features, such as Apple Music and Beats 1 streaming, that significantly impact the usage you’ll get in between charges.

It’s all too common to hear people say they wish they’d learned an instrument. Even when someone commits to learning guitar, the vast majority don’t stick with it. But we live in the digital age, and there are new ways to keep you engaged and learning.

Apple is following an unorthodox word-of-mouth marketing campaign for the iPhone X, and that has continued with a new press release issued by Apple — showing off the best review soundbites from the first reviews for its next-gen handset.

The press release is accompanied by a movie-style poster with quotes from outlets such as Mashable, TechCrunch, and others.

Apple TV 4K has a video output problem. It’s pretty serious when your main purpose is to output video. But after listening to user complaints, Apple has fixed the issue in tvOS 11.2, its next major software update.

Ireland’s High Court has rejected an appeal against Apple’s plans to build an 850 million euro ($960 million) data center in Athenry, County Galway. The rejection means that the project should finally, after much stalling, go ahead.

The appeal filed by several local residences objected to Apple’s plans due to their belief that it would have a negative impact on the environment. The judge said there was no basis for the objection being valid.

Users who want to change their third-party email address to an Apple email address can now do so, as revealed in a newly updated Apple support document.

Here’s how you do it (and one reason why you might not want to).

For the first time ever, a Mac app has won the super-prestigious Red Dot design awards’ Communication Design category. The app comes from Ukrainian Mac and iOS developer MacPaw, and you may have heard of it: Gemini is a de-duplication app that Cult of Mac has loved for years.

Having experienced declining iPhone sales in the Asia Pacific region, Apple is confident that the iPhone X will help turn things around — although local retailers are still fearing the worst.

According to a new report, iPhone X pre-orders have exceeded one million units in China, representing more than 1/6 of the total 5.5 million+ units supposedly already demanded by customers. Those kind of brisk sales are good for Apple, but sources in the Taiwanese retail channels think that this kind of “phenomenal demand” could soon fade away.

Does it seem strange that Apple would release two markedly different iPhone models, the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus and the radically different iPhone X, in the same year? If so, a new interview with Apple executives may help explain it: it wasn’t Apple’s original plan.

According to Dan Riccio, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, the company originally planned to deliver the iPhone X in 2018, a full twelve months later than it wound up introducing it. However, “with a lot of hard work, talent, grit, and determination we were able to deliver them this year.”

Anybody who thinks Apple can’t innovate should look in awe at the fecal hurricane whipped up by the company’s unorthodox iPhone X marketing plan.

By giving popular YouTubers early access to the next-gen iPhone, and allowing them to “scoop” the old-school journalists traditionally granted such preferential treatment, Cupertino upended the typical review cycle.

Apple apparently bruised a few fragile egos in the process. Frankly, it’s hilarious watching the ensuing media meltdown.

Apple Watch Series 3 owners can now get all the features they were promised from Apple’s new wearable at launch, thanks to a new watchOS update that brings some big new additions.

After months of testing, watchOS 4.1 was released to the public this morning. The update adds a number of performance improvements and changes, including LTE streaming for Apple Music.

This post is brought to you by Wondershare.

Losing iPhone contacts can be quite a nuisance. You have to collect contact details from all the important people in your life again. You can never recover some old contacts, and if you lose your business contacts that’s even worse.

However, if you’ve accidentally deleted your iPhone contacts, all hope isn’t lost. There are three convenient means of recovering deleted contacts on iPhone.

The 2018 iPhone won’t come with a rear-facing TrueDepth camera, according to one of the most accurate Apple analysts in the business.

KGI Securities analyst Ming Chi-Kuo sent investors a note today that the array of sensors that power Face ID and animoji will stay at the front of iPhones, for now.

iOS 11.1 is now available to all after more than a month of beta testing. The update brings a whole host of new emoji characters, new features, and improvements.

Apple has rejected updates to two popular iOS apps that attempted to provide users with a handy new shortcut on iPad.

The creators of Luna Display and Astropad devised a method of using the iPad’s front-facing camera as a button. Sadly, the shortcut did not go down well in Cupertino.

Apple has reportedly bought a California startup that developed new image sensor technology that could boost the iPhone’s photo and video capability.

A news website that covers the digital imaging space reported on Apple acquisitions of InVisage, citing unnamed sources that said the deal was completed in July. Some former InVisage employees are already working in Cupertino, according to the report.

Super Mario Run was the hottest game on iOS for months after it hit the App Store. It has now been downloaded more than 200 million times on mobile, and yet, the title is yet to reach “an acceptable profit point,” Nintendo says.

That’s bad news for fans of Nintendo’s mobile games.

Apple has denied that it ever considered embedding its Touch ID sensor into the display for its iPhone X, before running into problems and adopting Face ID instead.

In an interview with  Dan Riccio, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, Riccio “flatly counters the narrative” that Apple ever considered using Touch ID for its tenth anniversary iPhone.

Apple’s latest firmware for the unreleased HomePod revealed a new set of sounds that the smart speaker will use to indicate various user interactions.

The new tones for the Siri-powered speaker sound different from the ones leaked in a previous firmware build. They also serve different purposes. While the sounds are simple, they are quite lovely — and worthy of a $350 speaker.

Take a listen:

Is Apple building up a massive centralized archive of bra pictures belonging to its female users? To invoke Betteridge’s law about attention-grabbing headlines that end with a question mark, no, it’s not.

The internet went crazy yesterday after a tweet from one internet user pointed out that typing “brassiere” into the Photos app search bar of her iPhone brought up what appeared to be a folder showing various images of her in a state of undress. As it turns out, though, that’s not exactly the case.

As reality gets weirder, our ideas about the future get weirder still. The cyberpunk genre deals with ideas about what would happen when humans became enmeshed with computer networks. Now that that’s happening, the genre is asking new questions, like, what if you could hack people’s fears?