Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2016/06/thursday-morning-news300616/
Photos from Chinese social media site Weibo show off what appear to be a Lightning-enabled pair of EarPods, which either confirms Apple’s removal of the headphone jack in the next iPhone, or the end of the world as we know it, based on some people’s reactions. Besides the obvious change in connection, the EarPods with Lightning appear to be identical to regular EarPods, although their authenticity is still questionable, at best.
Audio chip manufacturing company Cirrus Logic has released a MFi Headset Development Kit, which they say will allow accessory developers to quickly develop Lightning-based headphones of reasonable quality. The additional costs of MFi certification are still likely to lead to a higher selling price of any Lightning headphones, but at least companies won’t have to start from scratch.
The Verge has an Apple I/O death chart, which reveals that Apple tends to keep IO ports for around 15 years on their products. The one exception to the trend is the headphone jack, which has been around since the very first Mac and continues to be a blight on devices everywhere.
Rumour has it this year’s iPhone will have a touch-sensitive home button with Force Touch. Why Force Touch and not 3D Touch I’m not entirely sure, but there’s got to be an advantage to having less moving parts in the iPhone. It used to be the case that home buttons on iPhones failed a lot — here’s hoping the move to a capacitive button solves those issues.
Apple has released the fourth developer betas of iOS 9.3.3, tvOS 9.2.2, and OS X 10.11.6. Meanwhile, everyone else is waiting for the public beta release of iOS 10 and macOS Sierra, which Apple says was going to come out in July.
The iPhone turned 9 years old yesterday, and AppleInsider says Apple now finds itself at a crossroads. While Apple as a company will be fine, it’s widely accepted that sales of the iPhone are on the decline, this year’s iPhone will be more of a sizzle than a bang, and all eyes are on what Apple will do for the tenth anniversary iPhone.
A new 3D Touch shortcut in iOS 10 lets you prioritise app downloads. Seems like a handy feature to have when you’re downloading a whole bunch of app updates at once.
Curiously, MacRumors notes many Apple Watch bands and combinations are currently sold out. It probably doesn’t mean anything, but it’s possible Apple is testing out seasonal availability of Watch bands, and is gearing up to launch new bands entirely.
A Rogue Amoeba blog post on what Gatekeeper Path Randomisation is and how it will break many apps is a good technical read on a software vulnerability and how Apple is dealing with it in macOS Sierra.
IMore runs us through the ten most underrated features in watchOS 3.
