Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2018/03/friday-morning-news020318/
A concept video shows us what a larger 6.5-inch iPhone with a similar design to the iPhone X would look like. The rumours seem pretty clear that we’ll be getting a larger version of the iPhone X this year, and provided Apple stick to the same dual-sided glass design, there’s a good chance we’ll see an iPhone X Plus towards the end of the year — although I’m not sure it’ll come with dual SIMs or in the gold.
Analysts claim the average iPhone lifespan comes in at over four years. It wasn’t all that long ago that people upgraded phones every year, but with smartphone maturity and less must-have features being introduced, it’s possible people just don’t feel the need to upgrade all that often. This could potentially become a problem for Apple and any other smartphone company, who needs to continue doing new and exciting things to ensure sales don’t begin to fall.
A new Apple support article provides advice on identifying legitimate emails from the App Store or iTunes Store. Phishing emails are all too common these days, and often, they can look good enough to fool anyone, especially when you’re giving them a quick skim in your inbox. Apple says emails about your digital purchases will never ask you to provide personal information via email, and you should never enter your account information on websites linked from these suspect emails, nor should you open or download attachments included with them.
Today’s update to Logic Pro X, version 10.4.1, includes important bug fixes from the major update that was 10.4. One such fix was an issue that caused the app to crash when opening projects created from an earlier version, other various crashing issues, and other usability issues.
Six Colors asks why Siri can’t answer flight status questions. Putting aside the fact that Siri works differently across various Apple devices, it’s curious that while search on the iPhone seems to show rich notifications about flight status, Siri remains oblivious to flight information. It’s as if that particular switch hasn’t been flipped, even though that’s probably a gross oversimplification of the issue.
Over in the US, Apple is starting up a pilot program that will allow Apple Stores and Apple Authorised Service Providers to continue to service the 21 and 27-inch iMacs originally introduced in 2011, despite those machines entering Vintage status at the beginning of March. Repairs of those machines will continue to be available until at least August 31, 2018, subject to parts availability from Apple. It certainly raises interesting questions: why this machine, and why now?
Carbon Copy Cloner is dropping support for APFS-formatted disk images, following their discovery of a bug that could lead to data loss on APFS sparse disk images. Their blog post on the issue says this is unlikely to be a widespread issue, given the relative scarcity of sparse images, especially ones formatted with APFS.
While AR continues to be a peripheral benefit rather than a must-have, one company is now recognising famous landmarks without location data. Blippar’s computer vision tech now has the ability to identify well-known landmarks from the real-time camera or from a photo. That all sounds pretty cool, but like I said, who is this going to be useful for? People that can’t name 2,000 landmarks?
MacStories has a post on creating a natural language parser Workflow that sends to-do items to Things. While Fantastical already kinda does this with reminders, having the rich metadata of a dedicated to-do app like Things really allows you to curate your tasks, and besides, being able to write items using a special syntax in any app and send it over to Things is neat.
If you’re looking for something to play this weekend, The Room: Old Sins is the fourth game in The Room series from Fireproof Games. It’s more of the same puzzle, perspective-based gameplay that you might have already seen before, but that probably doesn’t make it any worse. It’s $7.99, on the Australian App Store.
