Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2017/12/monday-morning-news111217/
A zero-day HomeKit vulnerability discovered in iOS 11.2 allowed unauthorised access to connected accessories. While details about how the vulnerability weren’t disclosed, the ramifications were pretty serious as this wasn’t a fault of individual accessories, but with the HomeKit back-end. This allowed Apple to roll out a server-side fix which temporarily disables remote access to shared users, with Apple also saying it would be restoring that functionality in a future update.
TechCrunch claims Apple is currently in the process of acquiring Shazam. There doesn’t seem to be any consensus on how much Apple will pay for the most well-known music identifying service, but the consensus seems to be around the $400 million mark. I’m not sure I see the fit for Apple, but it’s said Apple will roll Shazam’s capability into Siri, which already has some kind of music-identifying feature.
Jony Ive has re-taken the reigns of Apple’s design team, according to Bloomberg. The move comes with the completion of Apple Park, as Ive’s focus shifts from architectural back to the hardware and software. Former leaders of Apple’s hardware and software teams, Alan Dye and Richard Howarth, will now be reporting into Ive.
Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo’s latest report says next year’s iPhone will have a single-cell battery, as opposed to the two-celled L-shaped battery used in the current iPhone X. Moving to a one-cell battery could allow for a 10% increase in battery capacity, Kuo reports, in a phone that’s the same size and form factor as the iPhone X is now.
Meanwhile, the concept of an “iPhone Xc” imagines the iPhone X design in the same colours that the iPhone 5c was available in. I still maintain that the iPhone 5c was a pretty good design, but maybe didn’t meet Apple’s (or the general public’s) target of being a more affordable iPhone. Maybe if they billed it as a regular iPhone, just in a slightly different flavour, it would have lasted longer than it did.
I must have missed this, but Apple added a new colour option for the iPad Pro Leather Sleeve and Apple Pencil Case. Pink Fuchsia seems to look like a slightly faded version of the Product(RED) option, and there’s also a new Hermès band. The Noir Swift Leather Double Tour Médor is quite a mouthful, and is only available for the 38mm Apple Watch for $849. Yes, that’s just for the band.
Does anyone here own the Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad? Michael Tsai notes that a few reviews on Apple’s website make it out to be a little, uh, bendy. It’s not entirely surprising, given it’s a long, thin object with only a little aluminium to add rigidity, but still, you’d think that Apple would be into input devices that don’t wobble.
Joe Cieplinski tells us about Tally, a super-simple app that lets you keep multiple tallies of things you’d like to count, but don’t want to get serious about counting. I get it, but at the same time it seems like an easy gateway to some kind of OCD disorder where you suddenly find yourself counting every little thing in your life.
Six Colors tells us how to fix disappearing login items, which is apparently a thing that can happen if you’ve installed the macOS High Sierra 10.13.2 update that was released last week. Well, either that or it’s something that has started with High Sierra, but people are only noticing now.
There’s a new Apple TV screensaver featuring the lights of LA at night, and it’s available for download via the original link which gives you access to 2K or 4K, SDR or HDR versions of all of them. If you’re after the new LA one specifically, it’s the last one.
