Originally published at: https://appletalk.com.au/2019/04/thursday-morning-news040419/
The New York Times has some particularly introspective reporting on Apple’s media ambitions this morning. Despite not joining up to Apple’s News+ subscription service due to wanting to have their brand remain separate from every other publication in Apple News, The New York Times makes a good point about Apple’s one low price for all-you-can-eat news and magazines a great selling point for casual consumers. Price is also probably why a number of outlets did join forces with Apple to be available on hundreds of millions of devices worldwide.
There’s a similar piece from The Verge where editor Nilay Patel and Recode’s Peter Kafka discuss Apple’s new services, both as a business model and as part of Apple’s overall strategy. Their talk focused on Apple’s streaming TV plans, especially given the somewhat dichotomy of Apple offering other channels within its TV app, and its own original content via Apple TV+ — although given that’s a strategy that has worked for Netflix, maybe it will work for Apple, too.
Apple has made the PowerBeats Pro official, following a leak of the product in one of the later iOS 12.2 releases. PowerBeats Pro are kind of like AirPods, being truly wireless and come with a charging case, as well as featuring Apple’s latest H1 wireless chip, but also differ from AirPods in that they offer 9 hours of listening time and physical controls (including volume) on each earbud. They’ll be available in May for $349 Australian dollars, in four colours.
Which raises the question: if you’re in the market for wireless headphones from Apple, do you get AirPods, or PowerBeats Pro? AppleInsider’s comparison says that while there’s no wireless charging case for the PowerBeats Pro, but they may offer fit benefits due to their in-ear design with interchangeable tips which AirPods don’t currently offer. Physical volume and track controls are also a bonus, and if colours are something you want, then the sportier PowerBeats Pro also come in something other than Apple white.
A teardown of the iPad Air 3 (if that’s what we’re calling it now) says it takes a few of its features from the previously-available iPad Pro 10.5, including the Smart Connector, but also lacks a camera bump and only has two speakers instead of the iPad Pro’s four. There’s also no ProMotion 120Hz display on the iPad Air 3, but the internals are otherwise very similar.
Also from iFixit is their post-mortem on what finally killed AirPower. Apple’s design for AirPower was far more ambitious than just being a multi-device wireless charging mat, which meant many more charging coils than any other company was putting into their wireless charging mat. Unfortunately, that meant lots of noise and electromagnetic interference, which likely was the final nail in the coffin.
Once upon a time, if you wanted the best smartphone camera, then you purchased an iPhone. But that was six months (or more) ago, and now that other manufacturers have had a chance to catch up to all of the computational photography tricks that Apple is doing, the choice seems to be less clear. The iPhone isn’t even on the same level as some of the recent leaps from Google and Huawei when it comes to night photography, so it will be really interesting to see what Apple comes out with this year and how they sell it.
If you have a lot of money to spend on a desktop Mac, do you buy an iMac with a few extras, or go all-out and get an iMac Pro? That’s the question posed by Cnet, who says that it comes down to choosing the processor that will best fit your particular workflows. Everything else can be upgraded, even if it’s at some cost, but the CPU is really the only thing you’re stuck with for the life of the system, as they say.
Over at Macworld, Jason Snell says the iMac Pro is better than the regular iMac in pretty much every respect. It kind of has to be, for the sort of money you’re paying for it, but in retrospect, that makes high-end iMacs a bargain by comparison.
Apple’s latest video shows off Apple products at work. Perhaps not in a truly enterprise setting, but certainly being used in a small team to boost productivity as they gear up to pitch one of the most famous, yet unavailable to the public, Apple products ever: the round pizza box.
