Tuesday Morning News

Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2016/11/tuesday-morning-news081116/
mj1k2Apple has lowered pricing on USB-C adapters. Every USB-C cable and adapter has seen price drops, and Apple said in a statement that they want to help customers with the transition to the latest and greatest technology. After all, adapters are just a stop-gap until USB-C accessories start becoming as common as USB cables are today. Interestingly, Apple provided no explanation for similar price drops on the 4K and 5K LG displays, which also had their prices dropped by 25% for a limited time.

John Gruber’s link to a reaction about the “new” MacBook Pro which is in fact a reaction to the 4-year old MacBook Pro has many parallels to Stephen Darlington’s post on dongles. Darlington writes that he needed a bunch of adapters to connect to his 2011 MacBook Pro to all of his existing peripherals, too.

Stephen Hackett is reminded of the iMac G3 when talking about the new MacBook Pro dropping existing USB ports and going all-in on USB-C. The iMac G3 braved new waters by dropping ADB, SCSI, and Serial ports in favour of two USB ports, which probably seemed about as crazy then as it does now with the transition to USB-C.

But as much as you might hate getting new dongles for stuff, Tidbits explains why the Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C connector are better. Not just technically, but Thunderbolt 3’s support of basically everything you could ever want is why it’s the best possible choice.

The second beta of iOS 10.2 has been released to developers. MacRumors has a breakdown of the changes, which include the first look at Apple’s new TV app on the iPhone, which supports both single sign-on and Siri’s live tune-in. There’s an emergency SOS feature that comes from the Apple Watch, and also more visible shuffle and repeat controls in the Music app.

The Sydney Morning Herald has a report about the battle between the banks and Apple. It’s all-out war between the two companies to entrench themselves in the lives of consumers, as each side wants to capture the section of the market that just wants to live in the future and pay for stuff with their phone or watch.

A rumour claims Apple will be releasing a “Jet White” colour for the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, although I’m unsure why they’d release such a colour option into the iPhone 7 release cycle. 9to5Mac points out that even the white iPhone 4, despite being released nine months after the iPhone 4, was at least announced alongside the black colour option.

Six Colors writes about getting EV Nova up and running on macOS Sierra and OS X El Capitan. EV Nova was all the rage when I was in high school, and to date no other game has matched the space exploration/trading/combat gameplay in the same way.

Back in 2001 when Apple launched the iPod, it gave prototype iPods to journalists to take home and try. On those iPods were a collection of 20 CDs, and one such journalist managed to unearth and list the CDs included with the original iPod. It’s a great Apple story that I have not read before.

From the Úll developer conference comes the video of developers reading one-star reviews of their own apps.

With the current actions of the other banks, NAB (my current bank) about the launch a new app promoting its own Pay system (Android), and my overall experiences with Apple Pay — I opened an ANZ account to trial it — I am very very close to closing accounts and swathing the ANZ.