Monday Morning News

Originally published at: https://appletalk.com.au/2018/11/monday-morning-news191118/

There aren’t any third-party, MFI-certified, USB-C to Lightning cables, and that’s mostly on Apple, given that they don’t currently sell the official Lightning parts or offer MFI certification to third parties. That may change in mid 2019, but even then we might not see an untangling of the USB-C bag of hurt, with various power delivery wattages supported and different capabilities from cable to cable, meaning that it seem unlikely iPhones will make the switch anytime soon.

While AppleInsider is in favour of USB-C adoption and keeping Lightning around for a little longer, they say that if there’s one connection standard that has to die, it’s USB-A. Sure, USB-C has issues of its own, and we have decades of USB-A support to transition away from, but ripping off that bandaid will help in the long term, at least once Apple open up MFI certification for USB-C to Lightning parts.

9to5Mac praises Face ID on the new iPad Pros, saying that Face ID is even better on the iPad Pro than it is on the iPhone. Working in multiple orientations is part of that, but it also seems to work better at different angles, like when your iPad is laying flat on a desk. The only real complaints about Face ID on the iPad Pro I’ve seen is that camera placement in the middle of the bezel is also where you’re most likely to be holding the iPad, which isn’t great.

Unfortunately, the new iPad Pros are also somewhat susceptible to bending. Not that anyone is purposely going around to bend their $1200 tablet, but a horrific YouTube video shows that with a little force, the perfectly balanced iPad Pro will bend and break. And although the glass will crack into a hundred spiderwebs, it will mostly stay in one piece.

A single-tweet rumour claims new AirPods are coming this year (and that’s it!), but the year is quickly running out. You might have thought that if new AirPods were going to be released in time for the Christmas/holiday period, then Apple would have done it already, but if we’re going to see the same kind of shortages that AirPods had for months when they first launched, maybe a launch next year makes sense.

Apple has partnered with studio A24, in a multi-year agreement that will see the filmmakers producing a number of films for Apple. The studio has had some hits since it launched in 2012, including Moonlight, Lady Bird, as well as Ex Machina, The Lobster, and Hereditary, all of which were successful enough at the box office in an age of streaming.

Rob Griffiths takes a look at new MacBook Air performance, comparing it to a 2012 MacBook Air and 2013 MacBook Pro. Despite the new MacBook Air’s lower-powered CPU, with a TDP of less than half the 2012 MacBook Air, the new Retina MacBook Air is faster in a number of benchmarks than the MacBook Air, and in some cases, even faster than the MacBook Pro.

MacStories takes a look at Reminder and GoodTask, both third-party alternatives to Apple’s Reminders that offer a few extra features above and beyond that of the built-in app. While they both take a slightly different approach to task management shown by their slightly different interfaces, they both adopt modern iOS paradigms and are customisable enough for you to choose how you get things done.

A support article from Apple tells users to complete Final Cut projects that contain “legacy media”, which in this case is defined as a number of different camera formats. The support article lists the file formats that will be incompatible with future versions of macOS, also providing instructions on exporting your footage as Apple ProRes 422 Master Files.

Apple’s Certified Refurbished Online Store received a redesign sometime over the past week, and the new look is much more modern and in line with what you’d expect an Apple outlet to look like.

Most of my formats have had to be added by third party processes anyway. So someone is going to add these codecs back as soon as Apple doesn’t support them if there enough of a need anyway. This sounds more like Apple trying to route people into using specific codecs they like. Screw that. I’ll use the same lossless codecs I’ve used in my workflows for at least 15 years now. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

If only Apple worked that way…

I don’t think Apple is going to succeed in blocking off access to these codecs. I just think they won’t license and supply them natively. So it’s not an analogy for other issues (like port selection or repairability). I think you’ll be able to add them on the back end and it won’t affect your perception on the front-end.