Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2018/04/monday-morning-news160418/
An internal memo to Apple employees notes that the company caught 29 employees last year leaking information to the press, arresting 12 of those. As re-published by Bloomberg, Apple’s internal memo warns against employees, contractors, or suppliers leaking any kind of information, whether it’s about future Apple products, the Apple software roadmap, or internal meetings, discussions, and memos, saying that leaking affects everyone at Apple.
Rumour has it a future version of watchOS will support third-party watch faces. It’s been a long time coming, but if Apple nails Apple custom watch faces with watchOS 5, that will prompt me to get a new Apple Watch. The reference to third-party watch faces was discovered in the current version of watchOS 4.3.1, with a comment within the NanoTimeKit framework suggesting we’ll either get them as part of watchOS 5 or not at all.
Apple has committed to free repairs of Apple Watch Series 2 devices with swollen batteries or otherwise do not power on. According to the note published on Apple’s GSX repairs portal, only 42mm models are eligible for the repair, and Apple will cover affected devices from three years from the original date of purchase. A similar battery repair program was also introduced for the original Apple Watch, although there’s been nothing for the 38mm, Series 1, or Series 3 models thus far.
Photos from FCC filings show a gold iPhone X, but seeing as we’ve never heard or seen such a device, can only conclude that it was scrapped at the last minute by Apple. The gold is reminiscent of the champagne gold, including the edge of the device, which MacRumors speculates may have been why Apple decided not to release the device.
A cheaper HomePod may be on the way, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Sales estimates put HomePod sales at just above 2 million units this year, with the first million of those in the initial release. It’s possible that Apple doesn’t have a cheaper HomePod model in the works just yet given the HomePod’s lukewarm reception, but we’ll have to see.
Motherboard tells us the story of Apple suing an independent electronics repair store in Norway and losing. It all started with Norwegian customs seizing replacement screens for the iPhone 6 and 6S and alerting Apple, who then determined the parts were counterfeit. Apple sent Henrik Huseby a letter demanding settlement and for him to stop using aftermarket replacement parts, which Huseby decided to fight (and subsequently won) in court. Apple appealed the decision, and that’s where we are now.
Cardi B — no, I haven’t heard of her either before today — has broken Taylor Swift’s streaming record on Apple Music. Her debut album Invasion of Privacy clocked in at over 100 million streams, setting a new record for first-week streams by a solo female artist on Apple Music, putting it a fifth place on the list of most-streamed albums ever.
Ars Technica has the verdict on using external GPUs with a Mac. Thanks to macOS 10.13.4, external GPUs are now possible to be used with Macs, but that’s about where the good news ends. While there are appreciable performance bonuses to be had from using a bigger, more powerful graphics card, the end-user experience is currently too inconsistent for Ars to recommend to everyone. With a little extra polish and software maturity, external GPUs on Macs could be great.
Engadget tell us how to actually get work done on an iPad. It involves getting a decent keyboard case, using keyboard shortcuts, then some ideas native to the iPad so it doesn’t feel like you’re trying to replicate the laptop experience too much, including making use of the iPad’s multitasking gestures. I’m curious about the advice of using webapps instead of “mediocre mobile apps”, but maybe there’s something to that.
Last but not least, Six Colors tells us the tale of two QuickTimes. QuickTime 7 is not 64-bit and will likely be going away with the next macOS release (or whichever one prevents 32-bit apps from running), and that’s kind of problem because QuickTime Player X doesn’t do everything that QuickTime 7 did.
