Originally published at: https://appletalk.com.au/2019/02/monday-morning-news250219/
Apple has confirmed they will be closing two Apple Stores in northern Texas. Speculation from multiple sources claims they’re doing so to limit the potential for litigation from patent-holding companies, with the Eastern District of Texas where the stores are located being notorious for its friendliness towards patent holders. Apple, for their part, is directing customers to a new store opening April 13, across the jurisdictional border in the Northern District of Texas.
MacRumors has published the English translation of Apple Music VP Oliver Schusser’s remarks to a German blog regarding the App Store impact on European developers. Schusser says Apple has paid US $25 billion to European developers, Apple Music now has 50 million subscribers worldwide, and Apple Pay and iCloud are on track to be a $40 billion business per year. He also made sure to talk up Apple Music’s achievements, claiming that Apple Music is the number one streaming music service in the US and the leading music service globally on the iPhone.
A new support page on Apple’s developers portal gives developers more information regarding mandatory two-factor authentication starting February 27. There’s clarification on which kind of developer accounts need to enable two-factor authentication for their Apple ID, and crucially, steps on how to enable one device to receive verification codes from two Apple IDs, in case you have a separate Apple ID for your personal iCloud account and one for your developer account.
Rumour has it that Apple will be transitioning the Mac to ARM processors next year, and late last week this rumour was corroborated by another source. Platform unification is the idea behind the ARM transition, although there will be fringe benefits such as not being tied to Intel’s release cycles and Apple’s own in-house chip team being able to have some input on one of the more important parts of Apple’s oldest product lineup.
The Wall Street Journal claims Apple and financial company Goldman Sachs are working together on launching a credit card later this year. It’s said the card will have some special Apple Wallet integrations, potentially allowing for rewards tracking and spending goal-setting, with 9to5Mac pointing out that Apple being able to take a cut of their own card will contribute to Apple’s overall services revenue.
AppleInsider wonders if Apple’s modular Mac Pro might mean a Mac that’s made up of stackable modules, in a form factor similar to the current Mac mini. While separately purchasable modules would certainly allow for customisation and modularity, my concern is that any Mac Pro purchasers would be reliant on Apple to product the right kinds of modules for all the varied uses, instead of the much simpler solution of just using commodity PC hardware.
Adobe has released an update for Premiere CC following reports that the program was blowing out speakers on some MacBook Pros. I’m not sure how a software update is supposed to help a hardware issue after the fact, but if you use Premiere CC then I’d suggest downloading the update before you find yourself making an unplanned trip to the Apple Store.
The Loop points out two neat tricks to do with tabs in Mobile Safari. Being able to quickly close all your tabs is cool and all, but being able to close all the tabs from search results is even cooler.
If you don’t have an Apple Watch but still want to track your sleep and have it entered into Apple’s Health app, you can do so with just your iPhone and two sleep-related Shortcuts from Six Colors.
Apple’s latest ad, Flight, tells us about the freedom induced by being able to go anywhere with mobile data connectivity on your Apple Watch.