Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2016/09/thursday-morning-news010916/
A leaked photo of a packaging insert for the next iPhone tells us that this year’s iPhone will come with Lightning EarPods and a 3.5mm headphone jack adapter in the box. The feature sheet also indicates the device will be called the iPhone 7, with a Plus-moniker for (presumably) the larger version with a 5.5-inch display, with 256GB of on-board storage also being a very real possibility.
Next year’s iPhone, on the other hand, is once again rumoured to include an iris scanner in order to further Apple’s biometric security. I’m still very skeptical on how iris scanning would work (especially in dark environments or sub-optimal lighting conditions), but I guess anything is possible.
After its acqusition of Turi, Apple has posted job listings for its new machine learning division. The Seattle-based position is looking for data scientists and advanced application developers in order to power Apple’s intelligent user experiences across all of its streams.
Speaking of machine leaning, The Wall Street Journal tells us about the improvements to Siri in iOS 10. SPecifically, Siri’s integration with third-party apps is an important step in “making Siri more useful in everyday life”, with many of the demos presented so far focusing on mobile payments, image search, and messaging.
Wireless headphone company Bragi has teased they will also be announcing something next week, on the Tuesday before Apple’s big event. Speculation says they’ll be announcing either a partnership or acquisition by Apple, but Gruber’s take is that they’re currently panicking and want to get something out the door before Apple does.
Another round of iCloud storage upgrades are upon us, with the 2TB tier joining us ahead of next week’s Apple event. Two entire terabytes of iCloud storage will set you back $30 dollarydoos a month, which is double the amount you’ll be paying for the 1TB tier.
Tapbots has released the Pastebot for Mac beta, an app which provides a clipboard history as well as metadata and filtering options, which let you customise your data as you paste it. While I’ll continue to keep holding out for the return of Pastebot on iOS, their FAQ says they’ll consider it if Pastebot is successful and requested often enough.
Vesper’s sync service will be shutdown sometime later today, and the plan is to make the entire codebase available on GitHub - not necessarily as an example of how to build modern iOS apps, but more of a historical archive of one of the most interesting notes apps around.
Walt Mossberg writes that the post-Jobs Apple has seen financial success under Tim Cook’s leadership, but lacks any singular breakthrough product that has made as much of an impact as the iPhone or iPad has. And to be fair, maybe we’ll never see another product like that again from Apple, given that it could be argued that the iPhone is a once-in-a-generation thing.
Over at The Loop, Jim Dalrymple says we sometimes have unreasonable expectations from Apple. But as much we have our own selfish reasons for wanting Apple to include a particular feature, or to stick with the status quo and keep the damn headphone jack, it’s important to be just as vocal with praise as we are with criticism.