Thursday Morning News

c0bde557bf4e68979ed11e5910bc134e69979e7fApple has been found to infringe on a patent from the University of Wisconsin, which could lead to $862 million in payable damages. The patent itself deals with “improving power efficiency and overall performance” in processors by using a specialised “data speculation circuit”, otherwise known as branch prediction, as used in Apple’s A7, A8, and A8X SoC designs. The patent was also succesfully used against Intel’s Core 2 Duo line 2008, reports AppleInsider.

https://twitter.com/AppleMusicHelp/status/654280525889282048

The brand-new @AppleMusicHelp Twitter account is officially Apple turning to social media to help its customers. But like many such Twitter accounts, I can see it quickly becoming inundated with all manner of questions — wouldn’t it be better for Apple to publish knowledge base articles rather than answering individual questions on Twitter hundreds of times over?

The plan is still for Apple to increase the limit on iTunes Match libraries to 100,000 tracks before the end of the year. The change will also be applied to the similar Apple Music feature that scans and matches your songs, both of which are currently limited to 25,000 tracks — speaking to MacRumors, Apple SVP Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue said the company was “definitely working on it”.

The first untethered jailbreak for iOS 9 devices is out, albeit in Windows-only form. That said, the Pangu jailbreak supports iOS versions up to 9.0.2, and also works with the iPhone 6s. The usual caveats apply if you’re going to jailbreak your device: it absolutely reduces the security of your device, but also allows you to install packages outside of the App Store.

Apple’s support article on Wi-Fi Assist tells you how it works and what the feature is designed to do. It’s good to have some clarification on Apple on the limitations of Wi-Fi assist, just for us that don’t have near-unlimited mobile data plans.

The iMac bad news continues, as 9to5Mac spots a change in the 1TB Fusion Drive, which now only comes with 24GB of speedy flash storage. Previously that number was 128GB, but now it has been reduced to almost nothing, which makes me wonder what kind of performance benefit the 1TB Fusion Drive will have. For the record, the 2TB and 3TB Fusion Drives come with the full 128GB of flash storage.

On the plus side, even though Apple’s specs say you can put a max of 32GB of RAM in the 27-inch iMac, OWC has confirmed some models can handle up to 64GB. Not that it’s something everyone will want to do — a 64GB kit will cost US $1200 — but it’s nice to know that the option is there (and on the 27-inch, you can even install the RAM yourself).

Tweetbot 4 has added 3D Touch on the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, bringing the peek and pop gestures to individual tweets as well as being able to 3D Touch the homescreen for a set of actions. Not only that, but a subsequent update released immediately afterwards also includes the ability to dismiss the in-app Safari View via a backwards swipe, fixing a small niggle I had with the app when it originally launched.

The Iconfactory has released a super-simple Apple Watch app called Clicker, which is just an incremental counter. There’s an included Apple Watch complication, and you can decrement or reset the counter using Force Touch. Clicker is free, on the App Store.

Twelve South’s latest Apple Watch stand is the Forté, which is a little fancier than the company’s HiRise stand.


Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2015/10/thursday-morning-news151015/

1 Like

After getting on my high horse yesterday I’ve been thinking if a 24GB SSD is an issue for most people. It’d be great to know what the typical Apple user has installed on their machine and where I sit amongst that. I’m sure Apple has that data and based their decision on that.

When I think of a typical computer user, I always think of my mum. Aside from the OS, which is what - 15GB/20GB - and Microsoft Office the only other apps are tiny bits and pieces like Dropbox. So for someone like her the 24GB SSD is enough. She doesn’t need her media held on the SSD itself, just the applications.

Someone who needs their computer to do real productive work with professional apps probably wouldn’t go for the 1TB model anyway.

Again, Apple must have the data on this.

But yeah, value for money is another thing altogether.