Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2017/12/wednesday-morning-news201217/
We know that there’s some kind of wireless charging case for AirPods coming out next year, but speculation from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo now says we’ll also see an upgraded set of AirPods around the same time. AirPods continue to be in short supply, following a period of a mostly widespread availability — evidently, people think AirPods make good Christmas presents, or something.
Unfortunately, if you’re looking to pick up AirPods as a last-minute Christmas gift, you’re out of luck. The Australian Apple Online Store currently has week-long shipping times for AirPods, and while they can ship earlier, it’s a chance you’ll have to take. Alternatively, you may be able to try your luck at other retailers who also stock AirPods. The Verge says eBay in the US are selling AirPods, but you might have more luck at a brick-and-mortar like Myer.
Geekbench dug into their benchmarks to see if there was any truth to the rumour of Apple purposely down-clocking devices with aged batteries. It’s not conclusive by any means, but the graphs show some interesting distributions of scores that seem to support the theory of Apple limiting performance when battery condition deteriorates past a certain point.
The launch of Amazon Prime Video on the Apple TV set a new record for the most first-week downloads of any Apple TV app ever on the tvOS platform. Either there are a whole lot more Amazon Prime Subscribers than I thought there were, or Amazon Prime Video is just that popular.
Apple has released the second betas of iOS 11.2.5, watchOS 4.2.2, and tvOS 11.2.5. The point-five version number indicates that this is likely to be a release focuses on bug fixes rather than new features, which I’m sure will make plenty of people happy.
Following Apple’s acquisition of Shazam, the latest update of Shazam adds an offline identification mode that queues tracks for later identification. When you get back online, you don’t even have to go back to the app to have it match, instead you’ll get a notification to let you know when Shazam has found a match.
Rainbrow is an interesting iPhone X game that you control with your eyebrows. It’s said to use Apple’s ARKit, which leverages the TrueDepth camera system to detect facial expressions that form the basis of the game.
A bunch of screenshots from a British design student give us an idea of what an iPhone X system-wide dark mode would look like. Maximos Angelakis says the design was inspired by the Apple Watch interface, which is predominantly black for OLED reasons. It’s kind of like what we’d see if Apple took the black theme of the Apple Watch iOS app and applied it everywhere, and now that I think about it, I’m surprised they haven’t already done that.
The latest Apple Music ad is an animated rendition of “The Night Before Christmas” by Gwen Stefani. It’s also an ad from Stefani’s latest track, “You Make It Feel Like Christmas”.