Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2017/11/tuesday-morning-news141117/
With all the news recently about Apple’s redesigned brick and mortar stores, I’ve been wondering when they’ll be bringing the town square design to Australia. Chadstone will be the first Apple Store in Australia to receive the redesign treatment and three times the physical space, despite the location being located within a shopping centre and not a standalone building like many of the other new Apple Stores. The grand opening is on November 24.
One Vietnamese cybersecurity firm claims they’ve beaten Face ID on the iPhone X with a $150 mask that took less than a week to make. Ars isn’t convinced that it’s the real deal, saying that there’s a bunch of unanswered questions that throws some doubt over the entire process. I will say that Face ID learning your face over time is certainly fascinating.
The third betas of iOS 11.2, watchOS 4.2, tvOS 11.2, and macOS 10.13.2 are out, with the open beta versions expected to be released tomorrow. New in the third beta of iOS 11.2 is a pop-up telling users that tapping on the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth icons in Control Centre merely disconnects connected networks and devices until tomorrow, without turning the radios off.
I think we can all agree that activating Control Centre on the iPhone X is a little awkward, and people have been coming up with all sorts of potential alternatives. The best one I’ve seen so far is to activate AssistiveTouch at 15% opacity, put it in the bottom right corner, and make it activate Control Centre when tapped. There’s a few other smart suggestions from the Apple community, as covered by
MacRumors.
We’ve already seen a few ways to hide the notch on the iPhone X, and now there’s a third. Notcho by Cromulent Labs lets you easily hide the areas of the screen on either side by cleverly taking your wallpaper and applying some rounded edges. While the app is free to download, there’s a $2.99 in-app purchase to unlock watermark-free wallpapers exported using the app. There’s also the $1.49 Notch Remover app, which does a similar sort of thing.
The App Store and iTunes Stores on iOS now allow you to see your purchase history. This Apple support article shows you how.
Studded bracelets are coming to the Apple Watch Hermés lineup, which should make Nilay Patel of The Verge happy. Both 42mm single tour and 38mm double tour versions of the Medor band will be available, coming in at US $439 and $589, respectively.
There’s a bunch of technical notes about the SuperDuper! 3.0 release, which brings support for APFS and macOS High Sierra. With APFS still very much in its infancy there’s a few caveats you should be aware if you’re adopting on all platforms, but for most users, things should be fine.
TidBits tells us about how not all Thunderbolt 3 cables are equal, and in some scenarios, you’ll get severely hampered performance when using a Thunderbolt 3 cable and USB-only drives. It’s hard to know what’s to blame here, but does underscore the fallacies of USB-C being the be-all and end-all of connection standards — there’s simply too many gotchas for that to be true.
The coolest thing about the iPhone X, beyond the fact that it’s all screen or that it uses your face for unlocking, is that it’s an ode to ten years of iPhone design. While the black isn’t too bad, the silver looks incredible.