Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2017/09/thursday-morning-news280917/
Apple’s new privacy mini-site explains Apple’s commitment to privacy and how their belief that privacy is a fundamental human right is demonstrated across their entire product lineup. From software to services, Apple says every product is designed from the ground up to protect your personal information, whether it’s transactions performed with Apple Pay, conversations with iMessage secured by end-to-end encryption, or how your data is shared with third-party apps.
Over in the US, the Food and Drug Administration has announced a Digital Health Innovation Action Plan. As part of the plan, the FDA will partner with Apple and other companies including Fitbit to create a set of guidelines for other companies to follow so they can get FDA pre-certification when coming up with new health products, with the eventual goal of consumer-oriented health devices and software.
Apple gets sued by a lot of companies all the time, so a new lawsuit against them isn’t particularly new or even newsworthy. But a Native American tribe suing Apple for allegedly infringing one of their patents is a new one, and Ars Technica tells us the story of how this all happened. The patent in question appears to be related to the manufacturing and use of inductors with minimised electro-magnetic interference, and MEC Resources LLC seems to want a cut of iPad sales.
Apple has acknowledged an issue with iPhone 8 earpiece crackling, and has announced a fix is on its way in an upcoming software release. There’s no rhyme or reasons why certain devices are affected by the issue and not others, and in all reported cases, there doesn’t appear to be a common denominator between carriers, regions, or anything else.
New betas of every Apple software platform have been released to developers, and as part of Xcode 9.1, we now get a look at the iPhone X lock and home screen experiences. While macOS High Sierra 10.13.1, iOS 11.1, and tvOS 11.1 appear to have no user-facing features (yet!), watchOS 4.1 brings music streaming to the Apple Watch Series 3 with LTE, with a new Radio app for access to Beats 1 and other Apple Music stations.
If you’ve been trying to download macOS High Sierra from the Mac App Store but only get a 20MB file without the actual full installer, there’s an unofficial macOS High Sierra patcher application that can help you download the full version, in case you want to make a bootable USB. If you’re so inclined, the macOS High Sierra patcher application can also let you install High Sierra on unsupported Macs, and the creator’s site has a good guide on how it all works (and what doesn’t, if you’re going to run High Sierra on an unsupported Mac). Of course, all of this is done at your own risk.
On the other hand, even if you haven’t downloaded the full installer from the Mac App Store, Apple’s new-ish Recovery Mode options should let you perform an install of High Sierra on your own Mac. Starting up your Mac using Option+Command+R should install macOS High Sierra on any supported Mac from internet recovery, optionally allowing you to perform a clean install.
MacStories tells us about Shazam’s updated Apple Watch app which is now faster than it was before and even allows you to Shazam phone-free, if you have an Apple Watch with LTE.
Job listings from Apple have all but confirmed a new Apple Store location. There’s no word on when the first Apple Retail Store in Bangkok, Thailand will open, but with jobs already going up, there’s a good chance we’ll see it in the next couple of months, possibly even by the end of the year.