Originally published at: https://appletalk.com.au/2019/06/monday-morning-news100619/
Just like its Apple-branded sibling, the PowerBeats Pro has had the teardown treatment courtesy of iFixit, who took apart Beats’ totally wireless headphones with Apple special sauce. While the teardown does reveal that you could technically replace the batteries in your PowerBeats Pro yourself, your headphones are likely to suffer some cosmetic damage as a result. If that, and the overall lack of repairability doesn’t deter you, then PowerBeats Pro are now available to order online in Australia. While delivery dates are showing up as early June, you should be able to pick up at an Apple Store before the end of the month.
Sidecar in macOS Catalina is Apple’s take on using your iPad as a second screen for your Mac, as well as a touch-sensitive input device. But this kind of functionality has been offered by similar apps for years, who are now faced with a choice: do things differently enough to set them apart from Apple’s built-in implementation, or target some other segment of the market that Apple isn’t catering to with Sidecar. Those are the options faced by Duet and Astro HQ, makers of Duet Display and Luna, who sat down with TechCrunch to discuss their futures.
Multi-camera recording will become possible with new APIs in iOS 13, allowing apps to simultaneously capture video and audio from both the rear and front-facing cameras on an iPhone or iPad. What’s really cool is that an app can record from two cameras, then when you go to play back the video, you can switch between both cameras during playback at your leisure. Unfortunately, this feature will be hardware limited to Apple’s latest devices only, and there does seem to be some format limitations based off the slides shown at the WWDC session. We’ll know more when iOS 13 launches later this year.
If you manually update your iOS apps, iOS 13 includes a new feature that will let you delete your apps from the App Store’s Update screen. It’s a quality-of-life improvement that seems like a great way to get rid of apps that you no longer use, particularly those that keep bugging you for updates that add little in functionality.
Apple is continuing to work on battery ageing problems, and iOS 13 has a new battery optimisation feature aimed at reducing premature battery ageing by cutting down the time that a battery spends fully charged. For example, if you charge your iOS device overnight, iOS will use an internal tool that analyses your charging patterns and only charge your device fully just before you take it off the charger. It’ll be interesting to see if this results in less-charged devices due to people taking their devices off charge earlier than expected.
While Apple’s "Sign In with Apple" login method has been praised for the privacy affordances it offers users, there have been concerns about the guidelines Apple is attaching to its new sign in button. For starters, Apple is saying that developers who choose to offer a third-party sign in method must also include Sign In with Apple, taking the available sign-in methods to a minimum of two. And not only that, but Apple suggests that developers using Sign In with Apple place Apple’s login method above other login buttons, which may be seen as anti-competitive at an inconvenient time.
Apple realised something with the new Mac Pro, and depending who you read, it’s that’s sometimes, the old ways are the best. The new Mac Pro carries many design features from its predecessors before the trash can, modernising the platform into a veritable powerhouse that’s truly aimed at pros. Macworld calls the new Mac Pro a love letter to die hard fans.
The Verge asks that all the new improvements to multitasking, widgets on the homescreen, and all the other niceties included as part of iPadOS are nice and all, but do they make the platform intuitive? Arguably not, which is often the price that power users pay for more advanced features, which often come at the cost of discoverability or ease of use. While there’s certainly changes that can be utilised by those that don’t watch Apple keynotes at 3am, those wanting to get the most out of their iPad will likely want to jump onto the Apple website to learn about the new stuff.
The Atlantic describes a new phenomenon where teens are AirDropping photos to each other en-masse, with adults sometimes caught in the cross-fire. It’s a kind of social media, localised to the train/bus/place that you’re in. The lack of AirDrop policing also means that pretty much any content goes, which can sometimes be a problem in the classroom. But it’s probably just harmless.
If you were at WWDC this year, or even if you weren’t but wish you were, there’s an Apple Music playlist of the songs played in sessions. There’s also a Spotify version, if you’re so inclined.