Originally published at: https://appletalk.com.au/2019/07/wednesday-morning-news310719/
Today at Apple sessions at Apple Stores now offer a new experience in the form of augmented reality experiences. They’re called [AR]T Walks, and are comprised of an outdoor interactive walk featuring contemporary artists, as well as an in-store component that teaches AR using Swift Playgrounds and an AR art installation viewable in every Apple Store worldwide. Apple’s newsroom post has more details on how the AR experiences were created in partnership with a New York art museum, and [AR]T Walks become bookable at your local Australian Apple Store starting August 10.
Apple’s third quarter 2019 financial results are out, and Six Colors has the graphs. The company generated US $53.8 billion in revenue and made $10 billion in profit, with wearables revenue up 68% year-on-year, services up 13%, Mac up 11%, and iPad up 8%, while the iPhone went down 12% revenue year-on-year. Services continues to be a key focus for Apple, given that it’s now twice the size of Apple’s iPad business and about half the revenue that iPhone brings in, and we should have more analysis once the post-earnings conference call wraps up a little later.
But this quarter was the second one in a row with falling iPhone revenue, which means that for the first time since 2012, the iPhone now makes up less than half of Apple’s revenue. Just under $26 billion of iPhone sales is nothing to scoff at, but in just a few short years, Apple’s iPhone revenue has gone from being two-thirds of the company revenue stream to under half. Apple no longer reports unit sales, so it’s hard to know how many iPhones are being sold, which makes we can no longer come up with mind-blowing statistics like Apple sells 9 iPhones every second of every day for the past 90 days.
Google has detailed five of six zero-day, zero-interaction bugs that affected iOS and iMessage, but have since been patched via the iOS 12.4 update that was released last week. According to ZDNet, details of the last bug were kept private due to Google saying that Apple’s resolution did not completely solve the issue. Either way, these bugs could have been worth well over $5 million each, due to working on recent versions of iOS and requiring no user interaction to work.
The fourth iOS 13 public beta has been released today to coincide with the fifth developer beta released yesterday. Apple has given developers the fifth watchOS 6 developer beta — a good thing, because by all accounts the previous watchOS 6 beta was near-unusable.
New features in this release include the ability to customise your iPad home screen. Now you can choose between more icons or larger icons, changes to share sheet actions, as well as miscellaneous other tweaks here and there that offer a better user experience.
There’s a new LG UltraFine 5K display on sale at Apple, and the big difference compared to the previous model is that this one now supports USB-C. That means the UltraFine 5K now works with the iPad Pro, which makes it one of the few 5K displays compatible with Apple’s iPad. That’s the only major change, and otherwise you can pick one up for $1889.95 — while that’s still pricey, it’s nowhere near what the Apple Pro Display XDR will cost.
Apple Store Omotesando in Japan is undergoing serious renovations at the moment, with basement-level works now completed and ground-level works now in progress. Apple’s teaser on its website shows that the Omotesando location will re-open this year with an all new modern design, keeping the centralised glass spiral staircase, but bringing it into line with many Apple Stores.
Xbox co-creator Nat Brown has left Valve and is starting at Apple. Twitter posts from Brown say he’ll be working on all applications of graphics, as well as working with developers using graphics on Apple platforms. MacRumors says although it’s possible Brown will be joining Apple’s VR/AR team given his previous employment at Valve was on the VR effort there, such speculation would be exactly that.
AppleInsider has a explainer on what Apple’s T2 chip does in your MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, even though it’s now found in a number of other Apple desktops. It’s main function is as a security processor, preventing malware from affecting your computer or stealing your data. For whatever reason, it also processes audio for Macs that feature an onboard microphone, and there’s also evidence to say that video processing is faster with a T2 chip onboard.
Apple’s latest Shot on iPhone ad campaign has gone "on tour" with 16 artists and bands around the world. Three new videos show off up close and behind the scenes footage from those tours, with the mini-documentaries being shot on iPhone, sometimes with additional hardware and software lending a helping hand.