Wednesday Morning News

Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2016/11/wednesday-morning-news091116/
iphone-se-four-colorsJason Snell’s post on travelling with the 13-inch MacBook Pro says that it’s a lot like the MacBook Air and the single-port Retina MacBook. You’ll have to use adapters for a little while until USB-C accessories start becoming more common, but other than that, it’s a fine machine that also lets you pack a single charging cube for your computer and your iOS devices, provided you have a USB-C to Lightning cable.

If you’ve been seeing reports that Apple has taken close to 104% of smartphone profits in the last quarter with only 11% of smartphone market share and wondering how that works, Philip Elmer-DeWitt explains it as Samsung, LG, and HTC doing badly (and in the case of LG and HTC, losing cash) on their smartphone divisions over the same time period.

The Verge reports that Ireland will be appealing a decision by an EU court that would see Apple pay back huge tax subsidies. Of course, it’s in Ireland’s best interests to keep those tax subsidies, as it means many international companies choose Ireland as a base of operations for many financials.

Unfortunately for lovers of smaller devices, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says it’s unlikely the iPhone SE will get a refresh in early 2017, as Apple wants to maintain high profits on other models.

If you read App Store reviews like I do, one of the biggest complaints about the Apple Store app is that it removed the ability to make appointments from within the app. The good news is, Apple’s Support app looks to fill that gap, letting you schedule repair appointments and AppleCare services, or look up the appropriate support article for your issue.

TechCrunch says Apple picked up talent from defunct music startup Omnifone back in August, after Apple originally denied acquiring key assets from the streaming music company.

NiemanLabs tells us that Apple News has quietly become a significant traffic driver for some news organisations. The example cited is CNN, who says Apple News has given them 36.5 million uniques in September.

The second beta of macOS 10.12.2 has been seeded to developers, which includes the new emoji included as part of iOS 10.2.

Today’s Apple support article of the week is the one which tells you which wireless network iOS devices will try and auto-join.

If you’re not using the Touch Bar on your new MacBook Pro for anything in particular, you might as well put Nyan Cat on it, like one developer did.