Originally published at: https://appletalk.com.au/2018/11/friday-morning-news231118/
Apple’s four-day shopping event is now live with special offers when you buy selected products. As per previous years, this doesn’t mean discounts off Apple products, but instead you can get up to a $280 Apple Store Gift Card when buying various products, none of which include any product released within the last six months, unless you count custom configurations of the recently-updated 15-inch MacBook Pro with Radeon Pro Vega graphics card.
Other Apple-related specials for Black Friday include Softerino’s kit, a bundle of great Mac apps. Favourites such as DaisyDisk 4, Waltr 2, PDF Expert, Photolemur 3, and Gemini 2 are all part of the Mac All-Stars bundle, which you can pick up for US $35. Flexibits’ Mac and iOS apps are also on sale for 50% off or more, making it a good time to get Fantastical for Mac or iOS, or any of their other Mac apps at a discount.
Word has it Apple has resumed production of the iPhone X, in light of Apple reducing orders for the iPhone XS and XS Max. It’s unclear why Apple would resume production of a device it discontinued only a few months ago, but apparently the reason has to do with an agreement made with Samsung to purchase a certain quantity of OLED displays.
Cnet has the story of Singapore Airlines using iPads for the pilot duty process, or the pre and post-flight work that pilots have to do. Whether that’s keeping track of their own schedule, upcoming expirations on passports or visas, or simply how many hours they’ve flown that month, pilots now have access to that kind of information in their cockpit, without having to keep track of it manually. Singapore Airlines uses two custom apps that prioritised ease of use, both synced with the airline’s servers to provide accurate information for the iPad dashboards.
AppleInsider benchmarked the new Radeon Pro Vega graphics card in the 15-inch MacBook Pro, comparing it to previous models with the regular Radeon 560X. While benchmarks within macOS put the improvement at something like 20-35%, testing with the Unigine Heaven benchmark in Windows and macOS showed even more significant improvements, suggesting some kind of driver differences that allowed Windows to eke even more performance out of the upgrade.
Tidbits wonders what happened to 5K displays, with very few manufacturers offering a standalone 5K display. Even LG’s UltraFine 5K display appears to be on the verge of either being discontinued altogether or updated with a new model, but besides buying an iMac 5K or an iMac Pro, your options for 5K displays are limited. Perhaps people just don’t need that many pixels?
The Sweet Setup has a guide on how they manage Apple Photos. You’ve probably accumulated plenty of personal photos over the past decade of the iPhone, with some truly troubled individuals having over 30,000 photos in their iPhone Camera Roll alone. For those kinds of numbers, the only viable solution is iCloud Photo Library. And if you want to actually look or find a photo, you’ll appreciate the recent iOS 12 improvements to personalised albums you might care about, as well as major improvements to search.
In case you’ve ever wanted a Reddit client for your Apple Watch, the best one recently received an update with a brand new UI, new complications, and support for a few extra Reddit features it didn’t previously. I’m surprised Nano for Reddit is a) available for free on the App Store, and b) is actually usable for browsing Reddit on your tiny Apple Watch display.
MacRumors checks out a custom engraved, gold-plated Apple Watch Series 4. While the custom engraving adds a very cool, unique look to the device, I can’t help but feel that the gold plating of the Aurum Edition Monarch Counsel is going a little over the top, not to mention adding significantly to the purchase price.
The Verge takes us back to the days of the iPod and its famed click wheel, which they call the pinnacle of purposed hardware design. Touchscreens are great and all, but there was something about the known design of the click wheel that meant you could change a track, or the volume, without looking at the screen. Anyway, it’s not as if Apple has forgotten about the utility of physical buttons, at least not yet.