Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2017/01/thursday-morning-news120117/
The BBC has an interviewed Tony Fadell recently, asking him about the history of the iPhone. When the iPod was already a mature product with videos and games, developing a phone seemed like the next logical step. And with wireless data networks came the idea that the touchscreen device should be a general purpose platform.
There’s been a video of an early iPhone UI prototype that uses a scroll wheel for navigation floating around recently. The Verge talked to Tony Fadell about it, and about the two teams within Apple that worked simultaneously on both a click wheel based interface and one that was based on touch input. Fadell even says someone ported the click-wheel interface prototype to run on actual iPhone hardware, as the original ran on a Mac.
If there’s been ten years of the iPhone, that means ten years of iPhone teardowns. IFixit takes us through the different iPhone models in terms of repairability, and while the original iPhone scored a 2 out of 10 for repairability, the follow up iPhone 3G and 3GS shot up to a 7, which is pretty much where all iPhones have stayed since.
The creator of the Swift programming language has left Apple for Tesla. Chris Lattner was instrumental in the development of many versions of Xcode, LLVM, LLDB, and many other programming tools, and Tesla announced Lattner would be joining as their VP of Autopilot Software.
Matt Casebolt has also left Apple for Tesla. Casebolt was a Senior Director of Design at Apple, where he led the teams that designed the Touch Bar on the new MacBook Pro, the “trash can” design of the Mac Pro, and the first generation of MacBook Air. Casebolt’s position at Tesla will be Senior Director of Engineering, Closures, and Mechanisms.
User automation evangelist and Sal Soghoian left Apple late last year. He’s now resurfaced, penning an article at MacStories telling us how app extensions aren’t a replacement for user automation. The explanation of both shows that they’re clearly not the same thing, even though both have their own uses.
Digitimes says the design of this year’s iPhone will be a glass back and front with a stainless steel frame to hold it all together.
Rumour has it that there will be a 10.5-inch iPad released this year, and some number-crunching reveals that this magic number, even though it sits between existing iPad display sizes, will have a width that’s equal to the height of the 7.9-inch iPad mini.
One research firm claims AirPods already account for a quarter of the wireless headphone market, even though Bluetooth headphones have been a thing for years and there are already some pretty compelling models.
Speaking of AirPods, John Gruber has now started making YouTube videos. His first shows us the right way to remove AirPods from their case.