Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2018/04/thursday-morning-news260418/
Starting from May, Apple will begin to pay 13 billion Euros in back taxes to the Irish government, following an European Commission ruling almost two years ago that determined the company received illegal aid from Ireland that ultimately reduced Apple’s tax bill. The money will be paid into an escrow account while the two parties appeal the decision, and once the amount has been paid in full, additional interest payments will be calculated.
Apple CEO Tim Cook and Apple VP of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives Lisa Jackson recently attended the first state dinner hosted by President Donald Trump, held in honour of the French President Emmanuel Macron. Additionally, 9to5Mac also reports there will be a closed meeting between Trump and Cook today, although the topics up for discussion are currently unknown.
The iOS 11.3.1 update, released yesterday, resolves an issue with third-party display replacements which may have become unresponsive on iPhone 8 devices. Security improvements are included across the board for all iPhones and iPads in the update, as well as for Macs with the corresponding macOS 10.13.4 update, also released yesterday.
The latest iOS version adoption statistics put iOS 11 on 76% of active iOS devices, with 19% running iOS 10, and just 5% running an earlier version. MacRumors says many of these devices running older versions are likely a few years old now and unable to be updated to the latest version of iOS, which makes sense — there’s always going to be a small percentage of devices out in the wild that people hold onto for whatever reason.
Over at Wired, Tony Fadell says Apple needs to be the one to tackle smartphone addiction. Fadell compares technology to health nutrition, saying although we have clear guidelines for the amount and kinds of nutrients we need for a balanced diet, there’s no technological equivalent, and no one has any idea how much screen time is too much. Fadell also says Apple’s uniquely positioned to solve this problem, with system-level access to tell us how much time we’re spending on email, social media, and games from the device we all carry around in our pockets.
AppleInsider is defending Tim Cook this morning, following a drop in Apple’s share price drawing fire for the Apple CEO from analysts. None of that is particularly new, but I like how AppleInsider hits the nail on the head regarding arguments about “if Steve Jobs were still alive”.
Macworld’s Dan Moren explains why you can’t format an internal SSD in HFS+ if you’re running macOS High Sierra. It seems High Sierra has something of an affinity for APFS drives, so even if you boot from macOS Recovery, you’ll only be presented with APFS formatted options. If you want to downgrade back to Sierra, your best bet is to create a bootable installer and format your internal SSD after you’ve booted from it.
An interesting tip from iDownloadBlog says turning off Bluetooth at the appropriate time in the Apple Watch software update process can make the process much faster. It’s because the Apple Watch defaults to communicating over Bluetooth instead of Wi-Fi, but as we all know, Wi-Fi is a lot faster at transferring data than Bluetooth is.
Google’s new Tasks app for iPhone is a bare-bones reminder app that’s lacking a bunch of features you might want. But that’s OK for a brand-new app, and the hope is that it’ll get better quickly.
Apple’s latest ads in the UK once again tell us about using the Apple Pencil with the regular iPad, which is a pretty cool feature for a $469 tablet.