Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2016/10/thursday-morning-news271016/
Ahead of tomorrow’s Apple event, Ars Technica tells us what to expect given that it’s been about a year since Macs last had a refresh, and even longer since they were last redesigned. While MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs seem overdue for an upgrade, the situation becomes murkier when we’re talking about Apple’s desktops. All I’m saying is, whatever Apple are going to announce tomorrow better be insanely great.
Graphs of Apple’s Q4 2016 financial results from MacStories tell us the story of how Apple is doing compared to previous quarters. The Verge alarmingly reports that Apple has had its first annual revenue decline since 2001, but note that Apple’s financials have been within the company’s own estimates — and for the last 11 years, Apple has never reported revenue below its guidance, according to Horace Deidu.
A transcript of what Apple CEO Tim Cook had to say on the conference call after the results came out tells us a little more about the state of the company. CFO Luca Maestri weighed in with some more details about Apple’s financial. I particularly enjoyed the part where analysts attempted to get Cook to announce new products on the conference call, but failed to do so. I think I’ll call all future attempts to do so “a Munster”.
TechCrunch solves the mystery of the missing AirPods by saying Apple has pushed the release date back. Apple says that the AirPods are not quite ready, and they need a little more time — while it would have been nice to have the AirPods release simultaneously with the headphone jack-less iPhone 7, sometimes things don’t work out that way.
Rumour has it that Apple’s next iPhone will come in three different models, all featuring a glass back. A new 5-inch model will join the existing 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch models, although I’m not quite sure why. Surely there are people who would much rather prefer a smaller 4-inch device rather than something that sits between a large and even larger iPhone.
9to5Mac claims Apple will announce a new app for the Apple TV tomorrow, but it seems like a strange fit. There’s been nothing about the Apple TV for months, so it seems strange that Apple would suddenly announce a new app for it at a Mac-focused event, so I guess we’ll wait and see.
With the new MacBook Pro rumoured to remove the Escape key, macOS Sierra now lets you re-map the Escape key to another modifier key. My personal suggestion is Caps Lock, but even then that’s only a bandaid fix for the overall bigger issue: there is no escape.
Apple has moved from licensing GPU technologies to designing their own mobile GPUs, according to MacRumors. Apple’s A8 SoC was the first to include an Apple-designed GPU, with the A9 and A10 also including Apple’s own graphics processors.
IOS 10.1 includes a new popup that says legacy apps “may slow down your iPhone”. If you’re using an app that hasn’t been updated in a while (i.e. hasn’t been updated to support 64-bit), you’ll get the popup, but otherwise the app will continue to work just fine.
Chris Miles’ excellent EasyRes app for the Mac is now free, and it’s an really handy way to switch display resolutions quickly. It’ll let your Retina display go back to 1x display modes, and even has a handy preview of how much more “space” you’ll get (or lose).