Monday Morning News

Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2016/09/monday-morning-news050916/
https://twitter.com/Apple/status/771787818095874048

The latest report from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo lifts the curtain on the new iPhone. Dark Black and Piano Black will be the two new colour options, IPX7 waterproofing, some kind of display upgrade that closely mimics the wider colour gamut of the iPad Pro display, and a dual-camera system on the iPhone 7 Plus. Storage tiers will come in at 32, 128, and 256GB options, and some other minor changes to internal components.

With regards to the new colours, it’s rumoured that the dark black will be a matte option, while the piano black is glossy. Stickers for labelling test units have been spotted alongside a Foxconn badge/label, both of them identifying the same model as previous rumours. It’ll be interesting to see how much of a difference the two colours makes — and personally, it might be time to switch away from the white iPhone.

A roundup of what to expect from Thursday morning’s (for us Aussies, anyway) Apple event says it’s a given that we’ll see new iPhones, but what else could Apple show off? It’s possible that Apple will announce a refreshed Apple Watch model (with even more watch bands), as well as release dates for iOS 10 and macOS Sierra, but it’s just as likely Apple will do a silent release after the keynote for software, too.

Apple now has an official Twitter account, and it hasn’t tweeted yet.

…Or has it? There’s a phantom tweet floating around from Apple that tells us about the September 7th event that says they’ll remind you if you retweet it. When you do, you get an @reply back from the Apple account saying they’ll remind you when the time comes, even though neither of those two tweets show up in Apple’s feed. It’s all very strange.

The explanation of the invisible Apple tweet is that it’s some kind of promoted tweets magic. Tweets purchased as promoted tweets can only show up as promoted tweets, and never in the main timeline, which explains why Apple’s main tweet and the corresponding @replies don’t show up. The custom hashtag emoji probably also set them back a fair bit, but it’s Apple we’re talking about here.

Two new additions to Apple Music’s suggestions are the My New Music Mix and My Favourites Mix playlists, both of which take their cues from your listening habits. They’re available now for anyone running the iOS 10 beta, presumably for Apple’s algorithms to be given a bit of a pre-workout before the expected public release of iOS 10 later this week.

Apple’s latest security update for OS X fixes the same critical security exploits that allowed any iOS device to be jailbroken via a link. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend updating to Security Update 2016-001 for OS X El Capitan and Security Update 2016-005 for OS X Yosemite.

Next week is when the iPhone 4 goes to obsolete status, which will make repairs more difficult. The 13-inch MacBook (the Pro-less model released in 2008), along with a mid 2009 iMac and some mid 2010 Mac Minis will also join the iPhone 4 as obsolete.

Some App Store analysis from David Smith says Apple’s upcoming App Store cleanup can potentially remove up to 27% of all apps, provided Apple’s removal criteria is 64-bit support. I note that Pastebot from Tapbots falls into that category, so I wonder if it’ll be removed sometime later this week.

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Decisions, decisions… black is the new black it seems… I’m personally leaning towards glossy back…

My iPhone 3G and iPhone 4 were both black. Switched to white for the iPhone 5 and iPhone 6, and now that the iPhone 7 is out (and we have more colours than just black and white), I’m not sure which colour to go for, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be Bro’s Gold or Rose Gold.

matt black here we come…

I’m sure there’s a guy called Matt Black who is wondering why people are talking about him somewhere…

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