Thursday Morning News

Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2016/12/thursday-morning-news081216/
b9f50urx-e1481075136881There are now 20 million paying subscribers to Apple Music. The number, as revealed by Apple’s SVP of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue, represents a 15% increase on the 17 million subscribers previously reported in September. Billboard’s interview with Cue also points out that 60% of Apple Music subscribers had not purchased music from the iTunes Store within the last 12 months, although there are almost as many new customers.

With Apple sharing the statistic that 35% of US merchants now accept Apple Pay, I’m wondering what kind of percentage of Australian retailers support contactless payments. Five new banks and credit unions have also jumped on board the Apple Pay train in Australia, and although I’ve heard of exactly one of them, surely it must be demoralising to the rest that are still holding out — or perhaps this only adds to their resolve to not accept Apple Pay. But at what cost?

A minor but significant update to Apple’s support site now lets customers schedule repairs and appointments at Apple Authorised Service Providers. Although choosing a third-party AASP doesn’t let you know the next available appointment time like with an Apple Store appointment, the idea is that you may be able to get an appointment more easily at an AASP as opposed to the potentially lengthy wait times of an Apple retail location.

Bloomberg says Apple wants to bring early access to movie rentals on iTunes. The scheme would allow customers to rent titles as early as two weeks after their debut on the big screen, with an appreciably higher price to justify the cost of losing the exclusivity granted by cinemas.

While everyone has been discussing the possibility of a awe-inspiring iPhone release next year, Mac Otakara says we’ll see a relatively tame release of the s-revisions of the iPhone 7. There will be a new red colour, but no wireless charging or new design.

Apple’s single-sign on feature in tvOS and iOS promises a single place to put your credentials for apps, but the problem is not only that only a handful of providers support it, some haven’t updated their tvOS and iOS apps to use it. Not to mention it’s basically an unknown feature outside of the US.

Quartz has gotten their hands on some of Apple’s machine learning research, and it’s interesting stuff if you’re into the field of AI. It’s impressive that Apple’s GPUs can process twice as many images as Google’s with one third of the number of GPUs.

The seventh developer beta of iOS 10.2 has been released, ahead of what will likely be a public release next week.

I had no idea macOS Sierra brought some form of window-snapping to window management. While I probably won’t be giving up Divvy anytime soon, window snapping is a genuinely useful feature.

Wally Papes has a collection of cool Live Photo wallpapers, which are somewhat hard to find.

Sure it’s technically window snapping, but it’s not like the useful kind that you get in Windows or with BetterSnapTool/Magnet. I want the ability to drag a window to the sides of the screen and have it snap to a defined size (half the screen or something), or drag to the top to maximise. I don’t really want to have to use a 3rd party but yeah, seems like it’s still necessary unless I’m missing something.

I use Moom Moom · Many Tricks
I really like it.