Originally published at: https://appletalk.com.au/2018/08/monday-morning-news270818/
Apple’s newest store is in Kyoto, with the Shijō Dori location seeing record queues on opening day last Saturday. Like recent Apple location openings, Apple Kyoto offers Today at Apple learning sessions across photography, music, coding, and other topics, with a diverse range of employees from multiple countries fluent in 12 languages.
Bloomberg says Apple will be releasing a new lower-cost laptop with a Retina display later this year. It will be similar to the current MacBook Air, keeping the 13-inch display but with a Retina display, although it remains to be seen whether Apple can hit current MacBook Air pricing while also putting a Retina display in it. There’s also plans for Apple to release an updated Mac mini, the first update to Apple’s small form-factor desktop computer in years, with this year’s revision expected to feature an updated CPU and storage options to make it more appealing to pros.
Further speculation from John Gruber of Daring Fireball tells us about the possible scenarios for this low-cost Retina MacBook Air. While the Retina 12-inch MacBook is currently $400 more expensive than the cheapest MacBook Air, Apple is tasked with either making the new Retina MacBook Air too similar to the existing model and drawing criticism, or making it too large, driving up the price, and drawing slightly different criticism for the new machine being too expensive.
Apple’s most recent App Store removal is Onavo, Facebook’s VPN-like service that purported to keep you and your data safe. According to an Apple spokesperson, Onavo was pulled for collecting information about what other apps were installed on a user’s device for the purposes of analytics or advertising/marketing, as well as being clear about what user data will be collected and how it will be used. Any app that piped all of your web browsing traffic through Facebook’s servers always seemed like a bad idea to me, and now, Apple thinks so as well.
If you’re keeping score, we’re now up to the tenth developer beta of iOS 12, with the ninth public beta also available. With pretty much no new changes and this one coming just days after the previous beta release, we’re probably only two weeks out from an official release. The ninth developer beta of watchOS 5 is also out.
Meanwhile, macOS Mojave will not include Back to My Mac. A support article from Apple confirms the bad news, with advice on alternatives for remote file access, screen sharing, and remote desktop. While third-party apps allow you to screen share to your Mac, Apple is also recommending Apple Remote Desktop for remote Mac management.
In other macOS news, Microsoft says the September 2018 update for Office 365 for Mac will require macOS Sierra 10.12 or later — new features will be limited to Office 2019, with Office 2016 customers only getting security updates.
Gruber says Shake to Undo on iOS is great, but could be improved. While you can shake to undo most “actions” within apps, almost no-one knows about this feature, further complicated by a lack of a system-wide undo icon.
Stephen Hackett has been working on something special, and the Aqua Screenshot Library is a visual catalog of every major release of macOS since the Mac OS X Public Beta. All of the images came from the actual OS running on actual hardware, and coming in at over 1,500 images of simple dialog boxes all the way through to notable apps, is a great collection of the evolution of macOS through the ages.
Earlier this month marked the 20th anniversary of the iMac, and Ars Technica has photos, videos, and reviews of the computer that started it all. It started with the iMac G3 in 1998, and is still going strong, twenty years later.