Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2017/09/monday-morning-news250917/
Buzzfeed’s story on camera improvements in both the iPhone 8 and iPhone X tell us about how the Portrait Lighting effect suddenly transforms modern photography, elevating it to the levels previously only attainable by masters of the art. With Portrait Lighting, Apple spent a lot of time in the lab working out how they could reproduce different lighting effects with software, and in the end, they achieved the results they were looking for. Like many recent Apple innovations, it was the result of esoteric studying and raw technology.
Meanwhile, Mashable detailed processor improvements in the A11 Bionic chip that powers both the iPhone 8 and iPhone X. Apple starts designing silicon three years ahead of when it will launch, which means there’s sometimes a little imagination required to know where the industry will be heading. Sometimes that means changes need to be made in line with the ever-shifting goalposts in tech, but in the end, it all pays off when we can all leverage neural networks to track your face in real time to create animated emojis.
It’s this A11 Bionic chip that makes the iPhone 8 and iPhone X the world’s fastest phone. It’s not just faster than recently released devices from other manufacturers, it’s significantly faster, both in synthetic benchmarks and real-world speed tests. While the newest iPhones can even outpace laptops, it’s important to remember that laptops have the heat dissipation necessary to keep going for longer than mobile devices.
IFixit’s teardown of the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus tells us that the iPhone design hasn’t changed much from previous iterations. The display and battery are still fairly replaceable with the right tools, and even though the back glass is now the least repairable part on the device, hopefully Apple’s claim that it’s the strongest glass ever means that won’t be necessary.
Gruber’s thoughts on the updated Apple TV are limited by his lack of a 4K display, but echo similar sentiments to what I’ve been hearing about the updated Apple TV. New features in tvOS 11 make setup dead easy, everything feels faster and smoother, even if Apple did nothing significant to improve the usability of the Siri Remote. At the end of the day, you should probably only upgrade if you own an 4K TV.
Apple’s support article on finding and watching 4K, HDR, or Dolby Vision movies had nothing but bad news for Australians. Not only do you need an internet connection faster than 25 Mbps for 4K streaming, you also can’t download a 4K version of a movie. The implication is that you can only stream it, which reduces the amount of local storage you need, but also means that your internet connection better be up to the task. Maybe this is why the Apple TV doesn’t have that much inbuilt storage?
The good news is, rentals on iTunes now give you 48 hours to finish watching a movie once you’ve started. That’s double the time you had previously, which should mean you can be a little more flexible with your schedule.
Following Apple’s video on designing apps and games for the iPhone X, we’ve now seen similar resources for designing websites for the edge-to-edge and notched iPhone X screen. Max Rudberg also had some great ideas on making any elements on the bottom of your UI feel more at home, now that there’s no home button to act as a buffer between your app and the bottom of the device.
IDownloadBlog gives us a quick run-through of how to scan documents in the iOS 11 Notes app. It’s one of the features enabled by computer vision and ARKit, and if you have an iPad Pro with Apple Pencil, you also get access to Instant Notes from the lock screen.
Apple’s latest ad shows off things to love about the iPhone 8. There’s only 8 things listed in the video, but there’s many more.