Originally published at: https://appletalk.com.au/2018/12/thursday-morning-news131218/
Apple’s Texture acquisition from earlier this year is being integrated into Apple’s services ecosystem, with the most likely result being some kind of premium subscription within Apple News. Although it’s unclear whether it will be news or Texture’s previous content base of magazines that will be on offer, Bloomberg says Texture’s re-launch as an Apple service will test whether the all-you-can-eat model will work for news.
The Information claims Apple is building their own cellular modems, which is hardly surprising given Intel’s performance issues (relative to its competition) and Apple’s current spat with Qualcomm over patents. With the rumours saying the first 5G iPhone will launch in 2020 with an Intel modem, it’s entirely possible the next iPhone after that will include an Apple designed and manufactured modem.
Touch-integrated OLED panels may possibly be included in next year’s iPhones, allowing Apple to make devices thinner than ever before. Current OLED displays use a separate touch layer, which adds some thickness to the overall display, while new OLED technology featuring an integrated touch-sensitive layer which, eventually, will also be cheaper than using a separate touch-sensitive layer.
9to5Mac has speculation on the future of AirPower, saying that there’s three distinct possibilities. It’s becoming extremely unlikely that AirPower will ship this month, so either it has been cancelled altogether, will ship sometime in 2019, or just needs a little more time and will ship in Q1 2019.
Egyptians want cheaper iPhones, with the Egyptian Government demanding Apple resolve issues with “unfair restrictions” on regional product distributors that see high iPhone markups in the country. The problem is that Egypt has high iPhone pricing, even compared to neighbours like the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt has given Apple 60 days to fix the problem(s). Or else!
The Apple support article on your heart rate tells us that even though you can’t take an ECG outside of the US, you can use the ECG hardware in an Apple Watch Series 4 to take a more accurate heart rate reading, one that’s taken faster and updated more often than the standard heart rate reading performed by either the IR or green LEDs on the back of the Apple Watch.
AppleInsider takes you through a refresher of the 15 different gestures you can use to navigate around your iPhone. There are now so many different gestures that it’s hard to keep track of them all and what they do, which brings us back to the question: are iPhones too hard to use? Or are these kinds of swipes the kind of thing only advanced users should know, anyway?
Once the crown jewel of the App Store and the pinnacle of graphics technology (at the time, anyway), Epic Games has removed the Infinity Blade trilogy from the App Store. Citing “increasingly difficult support requirements”, Epic says that the games will continue to work for everyone that has previously purchased or downloaded them, although all in-app purchases have been removed.
The latest update to Office 365 on the Mac now includes Dark Mode in Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook when running on macOS Mojave. Other changes include calendar sharing in Outlook, Apple Continuity support in Powerpoint, and better proofreading tools in Word.
Pictures of the original Macintosh manual take us back to 1984, when computing was in its infancy and we had manuals that had, for some reason, plenty of marketing shots of people using the Macintosh in various ways, as well as detailed instructions on how to get the most out of Macintosh.