Apple has announced special versions of the Apple Watch Sport, available for sale for Chinese New Year. The yellow gold aluminium and regular silver aluminium models — both with Product(RED) Sport bands — will be available for purchase until February 22, with pricing starting at SGD $518 and $598 for the 38mm and 42mm models, respectively.
Another thing that came up over the holiday break was how people are using their nose as a substitute for their fingers, when touch interaction is required on the Apple Watch. The Apple solution for this would be to enable some kind of full-voice control, negating the need for touch input, but wait — doesn’t the Apple Watch already do that? Can’t you already activate the Apple Watch by saying “Hey Siri” and then telling that you want to send a message to someone in your contacts?
Apple is planning to expand its Retail Store presence in Latin America, with The Mac Observer saying the company will be opening stores in Mexico, Chile, Peru, and Argentina. There will also be a flagship store in Mexico City, and it’ll all be part of Apple’s international Apple Store expansion.
Yet another lawsuit has been filed against Apple, this time claiming the company used a partnership with biometric firm Valencell, in order to gain the information it needed to implement the heart-rate sensor in the Apple Watch. The lawsuit claims Apple-assigned IP addresses downloaded white papers from the Valencell website, which then contributed to the heart-rate sensing technology in the Apple Watch.
Samsung has upped the capacity on its portable SSDs, which now also sport a USB-C connector as found on the new Retina MacBook. While there’s no pricing guidance for the new portable SSDs, capacities of up to 2TB should mean we might be able to do away with spinny-disk drives sooner, rather than later.
Griffin’s latest products announced at CES are more about utility than anything else: the company’s BreakSafe adds a magnetic connection to the USB-C port found on the MacBook, and the keychain-sized Travel Power Bank lets you recharge your Apple Watch four times when you’re out and about.
MacStories tells us about achieving personal goals with Streaks, and if you needed an app to help you accomplish your New Years Resolutions, Streaks is definitely something worth looking into.
Apple’s support article on using Siri with your fourth-generation Apple TV tells you about the things you Siri can do on your TV.
Circus Ponies is a Mac developer who have been around since the NeXT days, and their NoteBook app was originally written for NeXTSTEP. Since then, NoteBook has been ported to OS X and iOS, but now, the company says they’re closing down.
Marco Arment’s return to blogging explains why the non-Retina MacBook from 2012 is still selling like hotcakes. It’s surprisingly popular in the educational market, and it has a number of other factors going for it — cost, upgradability, and ease-of-repairs being the biggest points.
Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2016/01/wednesday-morning-news060116/