Everyone’s favourite analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has predicted the launch of a 4-inch iPhone in early 2016. The device will be an upgraded iPhone 5s, but with the A9 processor found in the iPhone 6s. A colourful metal casing will differentiate the device from the current quartet of iPhone colours, and so long as we’re not calling it the cheaper iPhone, we’ll have to see how this rumour pans out.
This cheaper — sorry, smaller — smartphone is already being hailed as the iPhone 6c, which is weird given that it’ll have the internals of an iPhone 6s. A recent poll of US consumers says there’s still a market for smaller-screened devices, with one in five respondents saying they prefer 4-inch smartphones over larger alternatives. Anecdotally, I’ve heard a lot of people wanting a smaller device than the 4.7-inch iPhone 6/6s.
According to Digitimes, Apple no longer considers the Apple TV a hobby and has ramped up production on the media streaming device. Their latest intelligence says we’ll start to see faster hardware iterations, starting with a “dramatically faster” version of the Apple TV hardware, set to being production early next year. All that computing power has to be used for something, so there’s a good chance we’ll also see a few added features thrown in.
Apple has found an ally in their ongoing e-book price fixing battle in the courts. According to Ars Technica, the Authors Guild and several others writers groups told the Supreme Court “Apple didn’t illegally conspire with major publishers to fix and raise the prices of e-books, as an appeals court ruled”, instead increasing pricing competition.
Also from Ars Technica is a interview with Apple’s SVP Software Engineering Craig Federighi about open-sourcing Swift and the future of Apple’s programming language. With all future work set to happen in the open on Swift’s home on GitHub, the focus will definitely be on Swift for the next few decades, a sentiment echoed by Federighi over at The Next Web, who also had an interview with the Apple exec.
There have been mixed reports Apple has upped the 25,000 song limit for Apple Music and iTunes Match, but there’s no official word from on what the limit has been raised to.
The iPhone has taken out the top spot for the most popular camera used on Flickr, with the iPhone 6 and iPhone 5 jointly accounting for 42% of photos uploaded in 2015. Whether this is due to people uploading their entire photo libraries to Flickr instead of just being a site used more by pros, or a tribute to the rise of the iPhone as the best point-and-shoot in the world, well, that’s up to you to decide.
A piece over at The Verge says Apple being late to the party is nothing new, but perhaps it was a little too late to the party with music streaming. Apple Music is currently in fourth place behind the Pandora, Spotify, and Youtube trio, and with its launch hiccups, might not have what it takes to come out on top. But it’s early days yet.
There’s a new version of Pocket Weather out, and Pocket Weather 5 is the free update to Australia’s favourite weather app we’ve been looking forward to. There’s a new look and feel to go along with the Apple Watch complication and glance, and what’s more, the folks at Shifty Jelly say we’ll be getting more frequent updates going forward, instead of the larger all-in-one releases.
The latest version of Pedometer++ solves a problem to do with what Apple considers to be your primary device when counting steps. There’s always an easier way to start tracked walks, which has always been a little fiddly via Apple’s Workouts app.
SiriMote is a Mac app that lets you use the Siri Remote from the new Apple TV on your Mac, just without the touch surface. Other than that, the volume and media keys work as much as you’d expect them to. MacStories has more, if you’re interested.
After appearing in a short cameo in a recent Apple ad, Jon Favreau has his own 15-second short showing off Hey Siri on the set.
Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2015/12/monday-morning-news071215/
