Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2017/12/wednesday-morning-news131217/
Apple has updated the iMac Pro page on its website with a release date for Apple’s most powerful all-in-one. In Australia, the iMac Pro will be available on Friday, with YouTube personality Marques Brownlee saying that only the 8 and 10 core versions will be available to order this week, with the 14 and 18-core versions coming next year. Brownlee’s first-week impressions after a week with the iMac Pro say that it’s much, much, faster than any Mac before it.
But how much faster, exactly? Vincent Laforet says the iMac Pro spec that he received (a 10-core 3GHz, 2TB SSD, 128GB RAM monster) was about 2-3x faster over his current iMac and 15-inch MacBook Pro. When using industry-class software like Final Cut Pro X or whatever part of the Adobe suite you’re currently into, the new iMac Pro is fast. Cabel Sasser also posted his impressions in a seven tweet thread, showing off the new Space Grey design and better performance in games, courtesy of the new graphics card.
Other iMac Pro tidbits from this morning’s reveal include the new Twelve South Hi-Rise Pro for the iMac and iMac Pro. It’s a newer version of the company’s existing HiRise stand with a few changes and refinements. There’s also the black Lightning cable, which currently comes with the iMac Pro and isn’t available for sale — at least not from Apple as an official accessory. Black accessories seem like a slippery slope for Apple — how long before they start selling Black EarPods, AirPods, or whatever else?
Apple has opened up pre-orders of apps to all, with developers now able to put their unreleased apps for pre-orders across platforms. Apple’s iTunes Connect notes on preorders tell developers that paid apps will charge customers before the app begins to download automatically to devices before it’s released. It’s cool that this isn’t just an iOS thing, but across the Mac and tvOS platforms.
Just when you thought Apple was getting out of the AirPort game, they go and release a firmware update for AirPort Express, AirPort Extreme, and Time Capsule base stations. MacRumors speculates this is the fix for the Krack Wi-Fi vulnerability that popped up in the news a little while back, despite the lack of official release notes from Apple.
And in case you were wondering what Apple was planning to do with the iTunes Store, now that you can subscribe to Apple Music and get most of the songs available on-demand for streaming whenever you want, their answer is: nothing. Rumour has it Apple had previously planned to close the iTunes Store by 2019, but Apple has since denied any plans to shut down the iTunes Store.
Over at Medium, Halide’s designer Sebastiaan de With tells us about designing Halide for the iPhone X without an iPhone X. The process of starting with a few assumptions about the new iPhone, and then taking those and marrying them with some basic design principles meant that Halide had a solid baseline design to start off with. From there, it was all about the smaller details.
MacStories tells us about Things’ new “Mail to Things” feature. It’s essentially an email address you can email to-do items to, which then get put into your own Things Inbox.
A Google security researcher has released an iOS exploit to the public which could lead to the development of a new jailbreak for any iPhone 7, 6s, or below running iOS 11.1.2 or earlier.
Speaking of Google, the company has two new iOS apps out, both of which they’re calling “appsperiments”. Both Selfissimo! and Scrubbies are interesting photo and video experiments which do cool things — and the internet being as it is these days, it’s probably not a huge jump to say that one of these will become the next major social network.
