Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2018/05/tuesday-morning-news220518/
A stealthy price drop on Apple’s USB-C to Lightning cable fuels rumours that this year’s iPhone will include a USB-C charger in the box. Although iPhones and iPads are still expected to keep their Lightning connections, the $6 price drop to the new price of $29 in Australia for the standard metre-long cable, while not as much as the great USB-C discounts of 2016, should be a little more permanent this time.
Speaking of drops, Apple has dropped to the fourth spot in the annual Fortune 500 rankings of the biggest US companies by gross revenue. Walmart continues to eclipse both Exxon Mobile and Berkshire Hathaway, who sit at two and three, respectively, while Apple’s profits still remain the highest of any company on the list. Fortune attributes Apple’s slight dip in the rankings to smartphone saturation, and for a company sees almost two thirds of its revenue from a single product line, a small drop in revenue is not unusual.
9to5Mac takes a look back at a year of Today at Apple. The company’s new take on workshops dropped the technical training aspects for increased community engagement, introducing a new role and rolling out Today at Apple programs to every store that had gone through the modern store redesign. While that limits the number of locations that can hold sessions, hopefully in the future we’ll see Apple bring the program to more locations.
Device monitoring solution TeenSafe stored the Apple ID usernames and passwords of teenagers in plaintext on unsecured servers, and there’s now reason to believe at least some of those details, as well as device identifiers and the email addresses of parents, have been compromised. Worse still, usage of TeenSafe required two-factor authentication to be turned off, meaning that a password reset is the best bet for securing affected customer’s personal information.
Every time Google releases something frivolous like new vehicle icons for turn-by-turn navigation in its iOS app, I wonder how much longer Google Reader could have held on for, if that coding effort was put into something a little more meaningful. Niche, sure, but useful, unlike being able to swap out the blue navigation arrow for a more accurate depiction of your car.
The PowerMac G4 line saw three major models characterised by minor, but immediately recognisable, differences in external appearance. Several revisions of the Graphite PowerMac G4, QuickSilver, and Mirror Drive Doors were released, but by the time the last one rolled around, the PowerMac G5 brought a whole new era of power and aluminium.
MacStories gives us a walk-through of Castro 3, an update that brings the podcast client up to par with competing apps. If you, too, subscribe to so many podcasts that your queue resembles your inbox, then Castro’s triage management system, along with new trim silence, chapter support, and redesigned playing screen might be just what the doctor ordered.
Procreate Pocket, the iPhone-sized companion to the fully-featured iPad version, has now been updated to use the same Silica M graphics engine as its bigger sibling. An updated interface that’s been built to be used effectively on the iPhone along with many of the features that make the iPad version great, are all present in this free update.
Today’s Steve Jobs reminiscence post comes from Jim Black, who posted on Facebook about working with John Carmack as a technology evangelist at Apple. Black tells the story of a time Carmack wore a t-shirt with a bullet hole in the forehead graphic, and what happened when Jobs started shouting.
Apple’s latest ad in Korea features Animoji lip-syncing to an indie Korean group HUYKOH. It’s pretty cool, and I’m wondering whose faces Apple captured to get the effect just right.
