Speaking at the WSJDLive conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook has said the new Apple TV will be available next week, with pre-orders opening on Monday (probably our Tuesday) and orders shipping later in the week. There’s still no word on Australian pricing, but given recent price adjustments you’re probably looking at anywhere between $199 for the 32GB model to $299 for the 64GB model, but anything under $250 will be something to write about.
Cook also spoke about Apple Music subscribers, saying that the streaming service now has 6.5 million paying subscribers, with a further 8.5 million on the three-month trial. Those numbers compare favourably to Spotify, which has 20 million paying subscribers, but has also been around for a lot longer than Apple Music has.
The last notable thing Tim Cook touched on at WSJDLive was his disdain for encryption backdoors, saying that Apple would not include backdoors into their products in the interests of customer privacy and security. “It’s in everyone’s best interest that everybody is blocked out”, Cook said, as reported by Ars Technica.
If companies such as the BBC aren’t going to be developing their own apps for the new Apple TV, then developers will do it for them. An Apple TV proof-of-concept shows how easy it would be for the BBC to make their iPlayer available for the new Apple TV, now that tvOS has support for third-party apps.
Dale Myers works on Office for OS X and iOS at Microsoft, and over the weekend, he published a blog post about how the 1Password keychain and 1PasswordAnywhere feature leaks your data, potentially exposing metadata over the internet that could make phishing attacks a piece of cake. 1Password has since published a blog post outlining their perspective on the issue, saying that they’ve already taken steps to move users to a newer keychain format that doesn’t leak metadata. From the looks of it, they were in the sticky situation of upping security for everyone and breaking features used by some, or minimising the impact to customers and keeping the status quo.
Internet scammers are now turning their attention to the Mac, attempting to trick OS X users into thinking something is wrong with their iOS device or Mac. Ars has more info.
Apple has told a federal court that if an iOS device is running iOS 8 or later, then Apple is unable to unlock the device, going on to say it would be impossible to access the data without the passcode.
More channels have been added to the Apple TV, but by this point you already know they’re only of any real interest to the US market.
Apple has won another patent for gesture controls on a Mac, similar to how the Leap Motion works by interpreting motion gestures as input and translating that into input.
The Mac Observer has a summary of all the Apple Watch docks they’ve reviewed, in case you’re looking for something to charge your watch with that doesn’t involve just slapping it down on a desk.
Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2015/10/wednesday-morning-news211015/