Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2018/03/thursday-morning-news290318/
Speaking to Recode’s Kara Swisher and Chris Hayes from MSNBC, Apple CEO Tim Cook has commented on the Facebook and personal data privacy debate, saying that Facebook should have regulated itself. Now, it’s too late for late, and while Apple could have done similar things with customer data by monetising personal information, Apple’s product isn’t the customer. That in itself should say everything you need to know about Apple’s business models.
Apple’s Australian education page teased a simplified login experience for teachers and students yesterday, which would allow both groups to login to Apple products and services using existing Google or Microsoft accounts, apparently bypassing the need for an Apple ID altogether. The page has since been taken down, suggesting it was put up ahead of time, but with a release date of winter, we’ll see if this was real in the next few months.
Both Ars Technica and TechCrunch have smart pieces on Apple’s role in the education market, in light of their announcement yesterday. It seems that while Apple has the upper hand when it comes to end-to-end integrations and software solutions for tailored learning, Google is a big player in the classroom because of price. Chromebooks (and the newly announced Chrome tablet) running Chrome OS, paired with the integrations of Google Apps, provide some tough competition, and it remains to be seen whether Apple can re-take the education market.
New Apple Watch models this year will have a new design with a 15% larger display, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. While the 38mm and 42mm Watch designs have had a good run, the fourth model is probably about time for Apple to mix it up a bit, although it’s still unknown whether this larger display will come at the expense of a larger chassis or if Apple will do something radical like reduce bezel sizes.
Macworld has five reasons to buy the refreshed 9.7-inch iPad over an iPad Pro, but that’s not nearly enough. I personally can think of at least five hundred reasons why anyone should buy the cheaper iPad over the iPad Pro — unless you enjoy the niceness of premium features such as Touch ID, the True Tone display, and ProMotion tech, as pointed out by iMore.
As part of Apple’s education updates yesterday, both Clips and GarageBand received updates. The Clips update introduces new educational themed fonts and backgrounds, and could turn out to be a really great educational tool for students to build fun little videos of topics they’re interested in. And for whatever reason, you can now control GarageBand for iOS with your face, letting you control effects like guitar wah effects and synths.
The latest version of Twitterrific for iOS and Mac can now upload videos. There’s also bigger news in terms of the Twitter client supporting official mutes from the Twitter web interface, making it very possibly the first third-party Twitter client to do so.
Despite Pages being named the spiritual successor to iBooks Author, it seems it’s only a successor in spirit. Stephen Hackett had a look at the new authoring features in Pages, and found that it’s pretty basic, and is no replacement for documents edited in iBooks Author.
The list of iPhone and iPad games for people who never play games is good, but there’s a bunch I’d add to the list. There’s the recent title Florence (as reviewed by Reckoner), and I’d also be inclined to add any of Telltale’s games to the list, depending on which franchises you enjoy.