Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2017/11/monday-morning-news271117/
While everyone’s talking about Apple Park, we’ve heard almost nothing about Apple’s second spaceship campus. Apple’s Central and Wolfe campus has enjoyed none of the press coverage that Apple Park has, but it’s still an impressive site located in Sunnyvale, CA, and will be the second home to thousands of Apple employees when it opens sometime in 2018.
Now that the iPhone X is available in 13 more countries, it’s important for Apple to keep up with demand. A new research note from Ming-Chi Kuo says Apple are seeing improvements in production, helping them meet the current 1-2 week shipping times for the iPhone X in Australia, or the added demand from 13 new countries all buying Apple’s latest and greatest. Production estimates now put iPhone X numbers at around 450,000-550,000 devices per day.
While everyone was celebrating Thanksgiving in the US, AppleInsider decided to post how they’re thankful for the iPhone X. It’s a bit of a weird post — surely you have bigger, more important things to be thankful for — but I guess it works.
An Apple patent application revealed by the US PTO says Apple was investigating the possibility of using foldable displays in a future iPhone. While the iPhone X does use a folded OLED display as described in the patent to obtain the true edge-to-edge look, the patent goes one step further and describes a display that can be folded and unfolded during use.
Macworld’s Jason Snell says Apple’s next laptop should run iOS. It’s been a while since we’ve heard about the eventual convergence of macOS and iOS, but this isn’t that. Instead, Snell wants a device that’s kind of like an iPad Pro with a keyboard, except one that works a little more like a laptop than the hybrid touchscreen thing you end up with when you put a keyboard on an iPad.
Marco Arment has some ideas on how to fix the MacBook Pro, and the first thing to go is the butterfly switches in the keyboard. Reliability isn’t something you can compromise on when it comes to such an important input device, and Arment also wants first-party USB-C hubs from Apple and more ports. The Touch Bar doesn’t need to stay (but it’d be nice if Touch ID does if we can’t have Face ID), and some nice chargers would also be great, please.
Joe Cieplinski affirm’s Apple’s decision to “waste space” below the iOS keyboard on the iPhone X, because if they didn’t, they probably would have broken years of muscle memory for everyone who has ever used an iPhone with a home button. Leaving the area below the keyboard blank — save for the microphone icon, if you have dictation turned on, or the emoji button, if you have that keyboard enabled — is a smart idea, because putting anything too close to the bottom of the screen is not only a stretch, but feels wrong.
Dr Drang tells us about the proper order for listing modifier keys. It’s kinda weird that there are no human interface guidelines for this, but Apple’s preferred order appears to be Control, Option, Shift, Command, and then the letter. Displaying the keyboard shortcut and saying it out loud are two different things, though, and so both have different orders.
The weirdest accessory for the iPad I’ve ever seen is this thing that attaches four fans and a few batteries to your iPad. It’s supposedly designed for drone operators and the like, who can run into overheating issues when using iPads in direct sunlight for hours at a time.
