Monday Morning News

Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2017/08/monday-morning-news070817/

The HomePod firmware continues to deliver the goods about Apple’s upcoming product roadmap, including details about the next iPhone that we might not have known if it wasn’t for this prematurely released software for an unreleased product. Now, details of the screen resolution of the next iPhone give us a pretty good idea of the size and resolution of the next iPhone display, with John Gruber taking an educated guess and saying that it will be 5.8-inches, 2436x1125, 462 ppi, and a true @3x Retina display with no scaling.

The cool thing about all of this is that we’re still unsure what Apple will be doing with the display notch at the top of the device. Some mockups from designer Max Rudberg give us a feel for what it would look like if Apple embraced the notch, tried to hide it a little, or hid it and put a virtual home button on the screen at the bottom.

The HomePod firmware is also giving us a few clues about the capabilities of the next iPhone. Strings suggest that the next iPhone will be able to record 4K video at 60 fps using both the front and rear cameras, something that current iPhone models can’t do. There’s also the suggestion that the face recognition will be able to unlock when your device is laying flat, much like you can at the moment with Touch ID.

Although we’ve heard a lot about the next iPhone, there’s been very little information so far on the two iPhone refreshes that the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus are expected to see later this year. A dummy model for what’s purported to be the “iPhone 7S Plus” features a glass back, which would be a significant departure from Apple’s two-yearly iPhone design cycle.

As the HomePod firmware keeps on giving, another string suggests that an upcoming Apple TV will support 4K, 10-bit HDR, and Dolby Vision. You’ll probably need a new TV to support all of those extra features, though, unless you’ve recently coughed up for a telly with all the bells and whistles.

Bloomberg reports Apple will be releasing an Apple Watch with a built-in mobile data connection. The expected timeframe for such a device is sometime by the end of the year, freeing the Apple Watch from its current ties to the iPhone and allowing it to retrieve information from the internet by itself.

The Financial Times is claiming that Apple are experimenting with several different types of AR glasses. Something akin to Samsung’s head-mounted Galaxy Gear headsets, perhaps, or stand-alone glasses with built-in displays. Neil Cybart writes that Apple glasses are inevitable, as Apple pushes towards extending their wearables platform and furthering their product strategy.

A lengthy report by the Repair Association says tech companies including Apple have undermined and fought against green technology standards. They claim that technology companies as a whole are using the influential size to go against everything we’ve learned about proper environmental practice, fighting to keep devices harder to repair so they can profit.

Six Colors wonders if the Apple Pencil will ever play nice with the iPhone. It’s one of those things that if you expect Apple to have done it, they’d have done it by now. Maybe one of the reasons they haven’t is because the iPhone screen size is perceived as too small to support proper Pencil usage?

New ads from Apple include short teasers for Carpool Karaoke, which launches this week on Apple Music, and new ads clipped from the recently released The Rock x Siri short.

It’s so funny how dated/claustrophobic/cluttered the existing iPhone screen proportions look against these rudimentary mockups