Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2016/07/thursday-morning-news070716/
The latest renders of this year’s iPhone show a larger camera-hole in the regular-sized iPhone, some kind of dual-lens camera setup in the Plus-sized iPhone, and a stereo speaker setup on the bottom. While the rest of the device looks similar enough to the current iPhone design, there’s no headphone jack, fuelling rumours that Apple will remove the headphone jack in favour of dual speakers or some other feature which removes convenience for users.
Mac-specific malware is making headlines once again, due to the recent discovery of a new variant which provides almost complete access to an infected machine. The malware, included as part of EasyDoc Converter software, provides an attacker with access to the filesystem and webcam, communicating over the Tor network to provide anonymity for those using the tool for malicious purposes. While the default Gatekeeper settings will protect users, Apple’s anti-malware Xprotect has yet to be updated against the new malware.
IDownloadBlog has a thorough list of changes in iOS 10 beta 2, where they compare functionality to the first iOS 10 beta. While Notification Center widgets and Messages get the biggest improvements, future changes coming to Apple Music and other minor changes to icons all make up the second iOS 10 beta.
The fifth beta of iOS 9.3.3 has been seeded to developers and members of Apple’s public beta testing program.
A report says the iPhone has seen declining sales in China, which isn’t too unexpected given declining sales of the iPhone everywhere else, even on home turf. The iPhone sales decline in China means Apple is now fifth in China in terms of smartphone marketshare, although Apple has traditionally been less concerned about marketshare and more with profits.
Apple CEO Tim Cook and Senior VP of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue have been seen at the annual Sun Valley retreat, which sees the rich and famous from the corporate and political worlds mingle.
Logging in and out of Messages on devices means that some of your conversations may become “forked”, where conversations with the same people follow different threads depending on which device you’re messaging on. The “from” setting for iMessage is generally to blame, but if you have multiple devices, you have to make sure that that setting is the same on all of them, as explained by Six Colors.
Although the number of new features in macOS Sierra was generally nothing to get excited about, Dan Moren at Macworld writes that just making the different platforms interact better with one another is a feature in its own right.
Developer Mike Rundle was sick of Apple not updating their hardware, so he built his own. His US$1,200 Hackintosh is both cheaper and faster than any Mac Apple will sell you, and although there are a tonne of caveats for anyone wanting to do the same, the payoff might just be worth it.
Oh, and Pokémon Go is now out. It’s kind of like that augmented reality game Ingress that people were into a few years ago, only now with Pokémon. Yes, that’s right folks: you have to go outside for this one.