Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2016/10/thursday-morning-news061016/
Apple has moved its final quarterly earnings conference call of the year due to a scheduling conflict, and speculation says the two-day difference is because Apple is intending to hold an event on October 27th, the day the earnings call was originally scheduled for. Here’s hoping we see some new Macs before the end of the year, because that would be kind of cool.
Apple has quietly discontinued the third-gen Apple TV. Any backlog that Apple has will attempt to be fulfilled, but otherwise Apple is pointing towards people towards the fourth-gen model that runs tvOS, has Siri, and a wild remote. I don’t think the third-gen model was ever that popular in Australia, given it was introduced around the same time as Apple price increases.
The good news is, Apple is still the world’s most popular brand. Interbrand’s annual rankings put a $178 billion valuation on Apple’s brand, ahead of Google’s $133 billion and Coca-Cola’s $73 billion.
The second public beta of iOS 10.1 has been released to members of Apple’s public beta testing program. The update comes with the Portrait mode for the iPhone 7 Plus as well as improvements to Messages apps.
For the record, iMore tells us that the sapphire camera lens on the iPhone 7 is actually sapphire, which I don’t think was ever in doubt here. But iMore offers further clarification, saying that the difference shown off in the videos is because the sapphire is so thin that it’s fracturing, which looks a lot worse than scratching.
IFixit’s x-rays of the Lightning to 3.5mm Headphone Jack Adapter says there’s a lot going on for a simple adapter. A single mystery chip at the Lightning end probably contains a digital to audio converter, as well as an analog-to-digital converter.
An obtrusive popup bar has appeared for some users of the Dropbox client on the Mac, which only shows up when you’re in a Dropbox-synced folder. But you can’t disable this bar, which Dropbox says it has only rolled out as an experiment to some users.
App Store Search Ads have gone live — at least in the US App Store for iPhone and iPad, anyway. For once, Australia misses out, and for once, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, given early feedback.
ILounge reviews Belkin’s Audio + Charge Rockstar, a Lightning dongle that provides two Lightning ports for you to plug your Lightning to 3.5mm Headphone Jack Adapter in and charge at the same time. Perhaps they could have made a version with a Lightning port and a headphone jack. And then there’s the price: at $60 Australian dollary-doos, it’s not exactly cheap.
Recode reflects on some of the best Steve Jobs interviews five years after his death. They’re mostly cuts from the D:All Things Digital conference, but it’s where we got such gems as “they’re paying us to make those decisions”.