Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2017/09/tuesday-morning-news190917/
TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino interviewed Apple SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi about Face ID on the iPhone X. As part of training, Apple gathered raw sensor data from exhaustive scans of user’s faces, but Face ID won’t transmit your face to the cloud to further train its algorithmic engines to better recognise different types of faces. When you enrol your face in Face ID, it stays on-device. Even when you decide to grow a beard, or shave one off, Face ID will train to recognise your face even without that feature, and it’s all done on-device.
Apple’s response to the advertising industry, published by The Loop, says the company believes people have a right to privacy. Ad-tracking tech has become pervasive to the point where it’s possible to re-create someone’s browsing history, and it’s important to note that this only blocks cookies used for cross-site tracking, so advertisers can’t follow you around on the web. If you choose to interact with ads, that will still work, and if you want, you can also disable Safari’s upcoming Intelligent Tracking Prevention feature.
Apple has published updated App Store guidelines, now including explicit language that bans virus and malware scanners from the App Store. Apple has been banning virus and malware scanners from the App Store since 2015, in order to prevent customers from thinking that it’s possible for iOS devices to get viruses or malware from the App Store, but this is the first time it’s been officially official.
MacRumors reports that LTE-enabled Apple Watch devices will only work in the country of purchase. That seems a little strange, but perhaps it’s a limitation of the eSIM used within the Apple Watch. It’s possible that there’s some provisioning restrictions on how that works with telcos, although the limited number of LTE bands supported by the Apple Watch may also play a part.
If you have a Fusion Drive in your Mac, macOS High Sierra will not convert it to APFS when you upgrade. The first beta of High Sierra did, but future versions of the beta removed the ability to convert Fusion Drives to AFPS. With the launch of High Sierra still over a week away, and the recommended advice still being to not upgrade your main system if you have a SSD, you’ve got a little time to decide how good your backups are and whether you want to take the plunge.
Updates shipping estimates from Ming-Chi Kuo put the iPhone X at 40 million units per year, although whether that’s Apple’s quarterly year or the calendar year is less clear. Either way, Kuo says that supply is unlikely to catch up to demand until well into 2018, meaning that the iPhone X should turn out to be as rare as AirPods were — AirPods are down to a 1-2 week shipping time, just quietly.
If you think the new gestural interface of iOS 11 and the iPhone X seems familiar, you’re not wrong. The Verge says the iPhone X borrows from the Palm Pre, where many of the ideas about gestures and card-based navigation were executed in 2009’s iPhone killer. But there’s plenty of great ideas that still haven’t seen the light of day, so here’s hoping we get some of those, too.
HDR content is now available on the iTunes Store, and even if you don’t have a HDR-compatible TV, if you have either the 10.5-inch iPad Pro or the updated 12.9-inch, you can now enjoy more vivid colours on the small screen. You’ll still need to be running iOS 11, but… someone recommend me something to watch!
An unusual job at Apple is looking for someone who can help improve Siri’s capabilities when it comes to helping people with personal issues. Whether that’s living a healthier life, or getting a hand from a virtual assistant in an emergency, you’ll need a combined background in both software engineering and psychology.
Marco Arment writes about Apple’s latest bout of courage, the one where they changed iPhone iconography for at least the next few years, if not the foreseeable future, by updating the iPhone glyph to include the notch.