Monday Morning News

Originally published at: https://appletalk.com.au/2019/08/monday-morning-news190819/

The latest watchOS 6 has given us the first hints of new Apple Watch hardware, with images of the Apple Watch setup screen clearly showing two new variants of Apple Watch that we haven’t seen before. The new 44mm titanium and ceramic cases described in the images give us a taste of what could be just around the corner for the Apple Watch, and I know quite a few people that will be excited to see the return of the ceramic Apple Watch, but titanium should be pretty interesting to see, too.

With looming tariffs for consumer electronics imported from China, Apple CEO Tim Cook met with US President Donald Trump to discuss the impact of tariffs on Apple products. Discussing their meeting with reporters, Trump said that Cook made "a compelling argument" that the tariffs would put Apple at a competitive disadvantage against its rivals like Samsung. Apple has previously argued against tariffs on goods imported from China, saying that it would impact their global competitiveness and reduce Apple’s contribution to the US economy.

Apple is running an early access program for Apple Arcade, its gaming subscription service that works across Mac, iOS, and Apple TV devices. An internal early access program lets Apple employees access Apple Arcade free for the first month, then for the very reasonable price of 50 cents/month until iOS 13 becomes generally available. While there’s still questions that hang around whether the titles on offer will be compelling enough for yet another subscription, the premise of an all-you-can-play service is sound enough.

Changes to location permissions in iOS 13 have been called anti-competitive by developers, although it’s hard to tell from the paywalled article whether this is Apple being anticompetitive, as in Spotify, or if these apps were potentially mis-using location permissions in the first place. Any apps that use location permissions in iOS 13 are periodically shown to users along with a map of where the app has accessed their location, which should cut down on instances of apps abusing location permissions when they have no real need to.

If you’re a big fan of activity tracking, one of the coolest things in iOS 13 is Activity Trends, which should give you a better picture of how your activity stacks up over time. The idea is that the activity app will give you personalised recommendations of getting more active, whether that’s getting more stand hours (ugh), or taking a more active approach to your lifestyle, a move minute at a time.

TechCrunch shares the details of WebKit’s anti-tracking policies, which now have as much focus as security features. The crackdown on background and cross-site tracking from one of the world’s biggest browser engines heralds a new age of security and privacy, along with new technical measures to combat ways people circumvent them, which aligns with Apple’s own policies on those issues.

Macworld speculates what Intel’s next-generation of Intel CPUs could mean for Apple laptops. Intel’s 10th generation Ice Lake chips follow the recent trend of lower clocks but better performance, with the naming convention making sense if you know how it works. GPU performance receives a nice little boost, and preparation for better Wi-Fi technology means that the chips will at least be a little future-proofed, even if that future is a little while away.

It’s time for another reminder about global defaults, otherwise known as hidden macOS preferences. Although, looking through the list of defaults write commands shows plenty that can be set via the GUI, and don’t have to be typed into a Terminal, but maybe that comes down to the author’s usage of macOS Mojave instead of High Sierra or an older version.

Joe Cieplinski says the latest version of his watchOS caffeine-tracking app RECaf will still require an iPhone component due to watchOS SDK limitations. None of them seem insurmountable, or can’t be fixed by Apple in some way, but I do wonder about in-app purchases, which can’t be done at all on the watchOS side.

I’ve probably shared this one before, but if you’ve ever wanted to know what the music goes along with an Apple ad, keynote, or other video or event, then AppleMusic.info will likely have the track you’re looking for. Their latest update even has the 2019 WWDC playlist, which is pretty cool.

The morning news returns next Monday, August 26th.