Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2017/10/tuesday-morning-news031017/
Apple Music now has over 30 million paying subscribers, but Apple Music exec Jimmy Iovine doesn’t think the music streaming service is in the right place, despite adding millions of subscribers and tracks to its music catalog. Iovine tells Billboard that he doesn’t think Apple is close to success, what with competition from YouTube, and wants to do more for fans to follow their favourite artists.
One security company has analysed 73,000 Macs for firmware vulnerabilities, and found that 4.2% had different EFI firmware than what was prescribed for their hardware and OS version, despite software updates having been done which should have updated the firmware. Of the rest of the vulnerability categories — machines vulnerable to the original Thunderstrike, Thunderstrike 2, no EFI updates, failed EFI updates — there were only double-digits of Macs in each. Apple has introduced EFI firmware checking in macOS High Sierra, but it’s reported that this doesn’t do enough.
A rumour from the supply chain indicates Apple is investigating the possibility of developing ARM-based Mac processors and iPhone modems in-house. Apple currently sources its modems from Intel and Qualcomm, like the rest of the industry, and on the Mac side, it’s said Apple wants to better integrate touch, fingerprint, and display technologies into its machines.
Apple has acquired computer vision company Regained, who specialised in recognising content within photos. Although iOS already includes the ability to search for subjects in photos, Regained also has the ability to find the “best” shot in a series, as well as automatically detecting duplicates, as well as being able to analyse faces to determine gender, age, and emotion.
A federal judge has ruled the FBI is not obligated to reveal details about the company or tool it used to break into the iPhone 5C gathered as evidence in the San Bernardino shooting. The judge claimed that the vendor’s networks may not be as secure as the US Government’s, and revealing their name could open them up to attacks.
Apple’s latest open source release is the kernels of iOS and macOS over on GitHub, which also includes ARM versions of the kernels for the first time. Apple’s open source page also includes the kernels for all previous releases of iOS and macOS — curiously, while the kernel for macOS 10.13 is included, there’s no sign of the kernel for iOS 11.
An environmental report specifically for the iPhone X has been released by Apple, telling us about how the entire lifecycle of an iPhone X affects the environment with regards to greenhouse gas emissions, recycled content in the packaging, and the usual mercury-free displays, arsenic-free glass, and lack of BFR, PVC, and beryllium.
Debate continues to rage about which iPhone you should be buying. Besides being a phone that you’ll just have to see in person, the iPhone X is the future, and even though future revisions will likely be much better than what we have now, that doesn’t make it the smarter choice… necessarily. Paying a premium for animated emoji that syncs with your face seems insane, on some levels.
Interestingly, macOS Sierra doesn’t appear in the Purchased tab of the Mac App Store, as per a recent Apple support article. What’s even stranger is that Sierra doesn’t appear to be on the Mac App Store at all, even though the same support article says it should be.
The latest Apple ad shows off the portrait lighting feature found in the iPhone 8 Plus. Technically the feature is still in beta, but like portrait mode before it, seems to work pretty well.