Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2018/07/tuesday-morning-news030718/
GeekBench results for what’s purported to be one of this year’s iPhones give us some idea about the hardware specs of the device. The benchmarks say that at least one iPhone will have an A12 processor with 4GB of RAM, with modest performance boosts over the current crop of iPhones, including the iPhone X, likely due to minor processor architecture changes.
With previous rumours saying that this year’s iPhones will have a USB-C charger included in the box, we now have photos of what such a charger would look like. It’s pretty much what you expect, with a USB-C port where you’d normally expect a USB one to be, in the same compact form factor that Apple has been including with iPhones for years now. If the rumours are true, Apple will also be including a Lightning to USB-C cable in the box.
The fifth betas of iOS 11.4.1 and macOS 10.13.6 have been released, but they’re just bug fixes that contain no user-facing changes that anyone has documented.
Of all of Apple’s platforms that saw updates at WWDC 2018, one didn’t. Apple TV and tvOS were left out in the cold, prompting Macworld’s Dan Moren to ask about the updates to Apple’s entertainment platform. Perhaps there’s just nothing to announce right now about the Apple TV, or perhaps Apple are just saving their tvOS news until some of their original programming is ready to be shown off.
Perhaps it’s the lack of Mac updates that are getting to people, but 9to5Mac says that once Macs switch to ARM, they should be updated every year like iPhones. Once upon a time, we had regular spec bumps of the Mac lineup, at least once or twice a year, but that has dropped off in recent years as certain models are left to languish. Even if you’re not buying a new Mac every year like you do with iPhones, having new Macs released regularly means you know you’re always buying the latest model.
Over at Tech Pinions, Tim Bajarin writes that Apple’s most strategic investment of this year was Texture. Curated content that people can trust is becoming increasingly important in media, and while there isn’t much original content from Apple on News or within Texture, the lens that Apple applies is equally as important.
Besides all the visual changes of macOS Mojave, there’s plenty of functional changes that make Mojave that much better to use. TechCrunch’s first look tell us about the ways your Mac can now leverage your iPhone, improved privacy permissions seemingly lifted from iOS, and additions to Siri, including the assistant’s ability to interact with your HomeKit-compatible accessories.
Meanwhile, AppleInsider writes that Mojave is primarily aimed at those who have used iOS before, not people switching from a PC. Although it’s still the desktop interface we know and love, Mac versions of small iOS apps are the latest in a long line of steps designed to make iOS users feel more at home on the Mac, even while they continue to innovate in the iOS space with new AR and usability features.
Charged’s Owen Wilson says the Microsoft Surface Book 2 is everything the MacBook Pro should be. It’s a decent post that tells us about how great the hardware is and how useful the 2-in-1 form factor is compared to the traditional laptop, and although it doesn’t run macOS, unless you need to run Xcode you can perform all the same tasks; whether you pay the same price as a MacBook Pro for something that isn’t will depend on what you’re looking for in a computer.
A fun piece from Ars Technica tells us about what it’s like to work on a Macintosh IIsi in 2018, 28 years after the machine was introduced. As it turns out, 20MHz doesn’t you much in terms of computing power, but everything still works. Just a little more slowly than you might be used to, even with all of its after-market upgrades.