Tech Sensitivity

Even Tim Cook has noticed he’s over used the line, “this is the best iPhone we’ve ever made,” and seems to have dialled that back. But Apple executives do still tend to lean on their hyperbole API, and now it seems they do so even in internal memos.

As spotted by Bloomberg, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, John Ternus, has been stirring up the troops. The planned next iPhones are, he said, the “most ambitious in the product’s history.”

It wasn’t just a random internal message during an exchange about today’s menu at Cafe Macs in Apple Park. Instead, it was part of an announcement about that iPhone future.

Beyond the iPhone, Ternus was presumably working on the M4 Mac launches that are now expected soon. But, in the memo, he was also announcing the promotion of three people to vice president status.

One of them is Rich Dinh, who was senior director of product design, and whose previous work includes the new Camera Control button.

A render of an iPhone Fold

Dinh is now vice president of product design, apparently specifically for the iPhone. His new role is not yet listed on Apple’s leadership page, but then that hasn’t been updated to show Carol Surface leaving either.

Despite the iPhone now being 17 years old, it is genuinely true that each year’s model is the best Apple has ever made. It may not be that each time there is something substantially new, but there is always something we haven’t had — and that we now wouldn’t give up.

There is an argument that today’s iPhone is really the same as the 2007 original — but only because they are both rectangular and flat panes of glass. For the first time, it’s now possible that this basic shape may soon change, or at least a little.

If it does, it will perhaps be a case of Apple doing what it tends to do. Which is to come late to the party, but be the one that brings all the wine.

So it may be five years since Samsung first brought out a folding phone, but Apple is unquestionably working on one. At least internally.

A render of what the iPhone Fold could look like

There is, though, quite some doubt over whether Apple will ever release it. With any other company in the world, the sheer weight of patent evidence we have would guarantee they would bring out a folding phone.

Apple can’t enjoy cancelling projects, and Dinh would doubtlessly face a grilling from Tim Cook if he tried to ditch the iPhone fold. But the fact is that Apple has form in this, it could well drop the iPhone fold if it decides it won’t be a winner.

Which might be why in more recent years, rumors have blurred a little. Instead of an iPhone fold, there has been talk of a subtly different flip iPhone.

And then the road to an iPhone flip could be via Apple practicing to make a thinner model. Apple surely can’t let a folded iPhone flip be much wider than a current, regular iPhone.

So perhaps before we see a flip or a folding iPhone, we might see something else. Specifically, 2025 may bring us the iPhone 17 Slim.

Even the name of that might as well be a guess, since so little is known and only a tiny bit more is rumored. But it’s possible that the iPhone 17 range will drop the Plus model and instead have this Slim one.

It’s not even clear whether that means the Slim one will take the place of the Plus in the lineup. It could conceivably come in at the top of the range, and turn out to be the long-rumored iPhone Ultra.

To come in above the iPhone 17 Pro Max, the slim model would surely have to offer similar specifications. All that’s rumored so far is that it would have a 6.6-inch screen, putting it below the iPhone 16 Plus’s 6.7-inches.

However Ternus’s memo leaked out, it unfortunately didn’t come with any attachments. There is absolutely no evidence of what he meant by “most ambitious,” or “an exciting future.”

Nor is the entire text available for review. We don’t doubt that it exists, given Gurman’s reputation, but there’s a lot of missing context that could be gleaned.

Regardless, the rumors of a folding, flipping, slim iPhone are so plentiful that even without various patents, it would seem likely one is coming. Yet it could still be a case of wishful thinking.

And it could also be a case of a failure of imagination, it could be that Apple has something no one is expecting. It could be that Apple has a device in mind that no one has asked for, no one predicts, but everyone seems to want it when it’s out.

The United States introduced controls in 2022 that severely restricts any exports of AI chips to China. Two years later, TSMC is warning that there was an attempt to break those rules.

TSMC told the US Commerce Department that a customer had placed an order for chips that seemingly breached the sanctions, reports Reuters. The customer attempted to order a chip that was similar in design to the Ascend 910B, a processor designed by Huawei.

This chip in particular was made to be used for large language model training, a process in AI production.

TSMC, the Commerce Department, and Huawei did not respond to comment requests from the publication.

The alert to the Commerce Department arrives at a time when TSMC faces a probe into a very similar situation.

On October 18, it was revealed that the Commerce Department was investigating a potential sanctions breach by TSMC. A block in 2020 prevented Huawei from accessing components from U.S. companies without approval from the Department.

The rules also prevented access to chips made using U.S.-sourced equipment. This includes TSMC, which uses such hardware to produce its chips.

The probe was intended to determine if TSMC had made smartphone or AI chips for Huawei. This was apparently via an intermediary firm that masked Huawei as its client, with the probe determining if TSMC had performed enough checks on the client before production began.

If the probe found TSMC had broken sanctions, it faces penalties including sanctions of its own. The latter could be more damaging, as it could directly impact the production of chips for clients, which includes Apple.

Sanctions against TSMC would force Apple to find another chip supplier to work with for its products. This is a dire prospect for Apple in the short term, as the complexities of chip production means there’s no easy way to quickly spin up manufacturing with another foundry.

In the worst case scenario, this could mean a period when Apple will have severely constrained chip supplies as it transitions between suppliers. This in turn would hurt production of all of its products, including the iPhone.

Apple’s update to the iPad mini introduces relatively few changes to the form. It is practically the definition of a spec-bump update, with the main change being the A17 Pro chip, while everything else remains static.

This is certainly a play to make it a device consumers could buy to use Apple Intelligence on a tablet. At least, without buying a Pro.

The initial wave of reviews have surfaced, and have certainly picked up on the idea that it’s an internals-focused update.

Wired picked up on how there are few reasons for a sixth-gen iPad mini owner to pick up the new model, with it still having a 60Hz display and the same front-facing camera position.

However, Apple Intelligence will “transform the experience, even if slightly.” The more interesting stuff, like ChatGPT integration in Siri, will come later.

“For newcomers or anyone with an older Mini, this is otherwise a great tiny tablet. With a modern chip that supports the latest software smarts and accessories, the iPad Mini has been future-proofed for the next few years.”

The Engadget review declares the update as “safe” and “boring” from the outset. “What’s new here can be summed up quickly: more storage, support for the Apple Pencil Pro and, most crucially, a more powerful chip.”

While using the same aesthetics, there still “isn’t a lot to complain about when it comes to the iPad mini’s design.” The core of it is solid, and even webcam placement isn’t really that much of a bother.

For the A17 Pro, there’s discussion about the “weird bit of minor nerfing” when it comes to the GPU, but it’s doubted that anyone will truly notice it.

The update is a typical one “that focuses on software and internal hardware rather than a flashy redesign. But that’s OK.” It’s still a “solid performer” that is a great “little couch computing companion.”

The iPad mini “represents a new low for the product,” The Verge starts out. “It feels like an iPad designed by a supply chain, not by someone who actually wants you to like the product. ”

Despite the strong opening, it’s still deemed “a perfectly good tablet, of course.” However the only reason to buy it is “because it’s the iPad Mini. It has little else going for it.”

When pushed, the new chip has its limits, but in everyday use, it “feels one beat faster than the last model.” However, it “still matters that the Mini is “relatively underpowered.”

The review concludes, damningly, “Apple Intelligence better be a hell of an upgrade because, without it, the new Mini isn’t much of an upgrade at all.”

Following the release of the iPhone 16, owners of the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max took to the Apple Support Communities and other social platforms to report a problem. Their smartphones were locking up and restarting during typical everyday use.

Part of Monday’s collection of release candidates, the build of iOS 18.1 reveals that Apple will be fixing the problem with the full public release of that OS update. Elements of a release candidate are intended for the final release, and will carry over to it unless Apple finds an issue.

The release notes state that the update “fixes an issue where iPhone 16 or iPhone 16 Pro models may unexpectedly restart.”

The update also fixes a number of other issues affecting users, including one where Podcasts labels unplayed episodes as played. There’s another fix for when videos recorded at 4K 60 while the iPhone is warm could stutter when users scrub through the footage in Photos.

It also fixes a problem where digital car keys may not unlock or start a vehicle with passive entry enabled, if the iPhone is restored from a backup or the user transfers their key between iPhones.

The full public release of iOS 18.1 is set to be issued to the public on October 28. Along with fixes, the release’s main inclusion is Apple Intelligence, with the first wave offering text and image editing features using generative AI.

It was in May 2024 when members of French organizations including Alliance Digitale, and press organization Alliance de la Presse d’Information Generale, read AppleInsider and went wide-eyed. For AppleInsider had exclusively revealed Apple’s Web Eraser, which would later be renamed on release as Distraction Control.

At the time, Web Eraser was expected to let Safari users remove any part of a website from view, and naturally target number one would be ads. So the consortium wrote to Tim Cook, asking that Apple abandon it.

It appears that neither Cook nor anyone else at Apple responded. However, when it was ultimately released, Apple did say that Distraction Control would not permanently remove ads.

Now according to Business Insider, the same French group has written again. The new letter does not appear to be entirely a copy-and-paste from May 2024, but it’s close enough.

The letter says, presumably in French, that Distraction Control represents “an existential threat to the online advertising model, which underpins a significant portion of the internet’s economy.” The group wants Apple to suspend Distraction Control entirely.

What might make Apple pay more attention this time is that the group says they are “actively considering all available legal resources.” Significantly, that includes having sent a copy of the letter to the European Commission, which doesn’t seem overly fond of Apple at the moment.

Apple has not yet commented on the letter.

Early reviewers of the hearing test in the AirPods Pro 2 have unanimously called it impressive, and it will be coming to users by the end of October 2024. Ahead of that launch, Apple let ABC show “Good Morning America” into its testing facility known as Fantasia Lab.

“We don’t let cameras in this place normally,” John Ternus, senior vice president of hardware engineering at Apple told ABC. “And so it’s a little bit of an out-of-body experience for everybody.”

Fantasia Lab is at an undisclosed location in Cupertino, away from Apple Park. It’s in a nondescript office park, and contains an anechoic or long wave chamber, built on isolated springs and its own completely separate foundation.

In the chamber is a series of 50 speakers, arranged on scaffolding-like mounts in a spherical shape around a chair. “We create this complex sound field and then we add target talkers,” Apple engineer Kuba Mazur said, “and we ask you to repeat and that way we can understand your ability to hear speech and noise.”

“Everybody’s hearing profile is slightly different. So, essentially, we’ve run hundreds of people through here, running dozens of tests,” continued Mazur. Speaking of the quiet chamber, he added that after closing its door, “some folks even hear their heartbeat.”

Once Apple releases the hearing test function in the forthcoming iOS 18.1 update, every user of the AirPods Pro 2 will immediately have access to it. That means potentially millions of people being able to test their hearing at a moment’s notice.

“It is democratizing access to a test that normally requires you to go into a clinical office,” Dr. Sumbul Desai, vice president of health at Apple, said. “Seventy-five percent of people who have hearing loss do not get the help they need.”

“And so,” she continued, “if just by the simple fact we can do two things — provide access at home, and then two, simply, if you need a hearing aid, provide our AirPods — that’s really powerful.”

If you’ve ever copied a large file from a mounted .dmg file in macOS, you’ll know how annoying it can be to have to go back to the Finder to eject the disk once the copy finishes.

This is because the .dmg’s filesystem is in use during the copy. Finder holds the .dmg’s mounted volume captive as long as it is in use.

Starting from macOS Sequoia you can now tell the Finder to auto-eject the .dmg’s volume once the copy completes.

To do so, mount the .dmg of your choice, start copying files by dragging them from the .dmg’s volume to the Finder. Then, while the copy is still going, Control-click on the mounted volume and select Eject from the popup menu.

If the copy is still running, the Finder will throw up an alert telling you it can’t eject the volume because it’s in use. But now in macOS Sequoia, that alert features a new button: Eject when finished.

macOS Sequoia’s new Eject When Finished button.

If you immediately click Eject when finished, the Finder will automatically eject the .dmg’s volume when the copy is done. This saves you from having to go back and forth checking if the copy is done, then Control-clicking the volume’s icon in the Finder again to eject it.

Also, note that once a volume is mounted, it’s always possible to move the volume’s .dmg file to the Trash – even if a copy is in progress (or unless the .dmg is locked). The Finder only uses the .dmg for mounting, and once it’s been read volume references are held in virtual memory until the volume is ejected.

By using the new Eject when finished button, you can speed up your Finder workflow. All by mounting a .dmg, starting to copy from it, throwing the .dmg in the Trash, and using the Eject when finished button to auto-unmount the volume when the copy completes.

While Apple recently announced the seventh-generation iPad mini through a simple press release, new Mac computers will reportedly be revealed via an online event later in October.

In a social media post on Threads, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman says that the inventory of Mac and Mac-related products in Apple Stores is currently “very low.” This includes iMacs, MacBook Pros, Mac mini units, the Magic Mouse, and Magic Trackpad.

According to the post, the iMac and MacBook Pro are expected to receive the Apple M4 chip, currently only found in the iPad Pro. The Mac Mini, meanwhile, is set to receive a “full-scale overhaul,” which aligns with previous rumors saying that the device would come in a smaller form factor and that it would feature a different selection of ports.

“I’ve seen no evidence to suggest Apple will hold a full-scale, iPhone-like event at its headquarters with press,” Gurman said. “Instead, I’d anticipate the announcement to be online-focused with press hands-on opportunities, not too dissimilar from Scary Fast last year.”

This would align with Apple’s previous events, such as the online iPad event in May of 2024, where redesigned iPad Pro and iPad Air models were introduced.

This event, much like the Scary Fast event from October 2023, had no in-person component and was streamed online through Apple’s website. Select members of the press got hands-on opportunities in London and New York.

Gurman has previously said that he expects new Mac computers with an M4 chip to launch on November 1, 2024, following the rumored October event.

By instructing their users to visit a website rather than pay via the App Store, Disney is able to save money and avoid paying Apple a fee. For in-app purchases such as subscriptions, Apple typically charges companies a fee for every transaction made within the app, which can be up to 30% of the payment.

The subscription-related change can be found on the official Disney and Hulu websites. New and returning subscribers cannot pay for their subscriptions through Apple, nor can they sign up for either of the services. Existing Apple-billed subscribers will remain unaffected, however, according to the Disney+ and Hulu websites.

As noted by MacRumors, users will still be able to enjoy their Disney+ and Hulu content on iOS but will need to sign in via the respective apps. For payments, however, users will need to turn to the Disney+ and Hulu websites. From there, it’s possible to view all available subscription plans and sign up for a subscription directly.

In-app purchases and their associated App Store fees have often caused much controversy in the past, with companies such as Epic Games going so far as suing Apple. In February of 2024, streaming service Netflix also ended support for in-app payments.

On Monday, Apple made the release candidate version of iOS 18.1 available to developers, ahead of the software’s public launch on October 28. Similar to previous developer betas, Monday’s release candidate introduces support for a new software feature and includes key bug fixes.

In addition to the various issues the update resolves, the RC version of iOS 18.1 enhances the existing business messaging feature by adding support for the RCS protocol.

Business Messaging, previously known as Business Chat, made it possible for users to communicate with businesses directly within the Messages app, through iMessage.

This feature was originally introduced as a more convenient way of communication, as opposed to users relying on email and companies’ proprietary web-based chat systems.

iOS 18.1 further improves the Business Messaging feature by adding RCS support. RCS, short for Rich Communication Services, is a text messaging protocol that offers better compatibility with Android devices, and also brings substantial improvements over traditional SMS messages.

RCS is now available for Business Messaging in iOS 18.1.

While Apple already introduced RCS support for Messages with the public release of iOS 18, the company’s iOS 18.1 release candidate makes it possible to use the RCS protocol in business chats as well.

With RCS, videos and GIFs maintain their full quality when sent from iPhone to Android and vice versa, while group chats, read receipts, and typing indicators also work between the two platforms.

Along with the enhancements to Business Messaging, the iOS 18.1 update also introduces various bug fixes. The update resolves a frequent restart issue affecting devices in the iPhone 16 range, among other things.

iOS 18.1 resolves an issue reported by multiple iPhone 16 owners, where the devices would repeatedly freeze up and restart themselves during normal day-to-day use. The bug was most commonly encountered on iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max units, which would sometimes crash even when in standby mode.

iOS 18.1 fixes an issue with random restarts on devices in the iPhone 16 range.

According to the iOS 18.1 RC release notes, published by Apple on Monday, the update addresses a few other bugs previously present within the iPhone operating system:

• Fixes an issue in Podcasts where unplayed episodes are marked as played.
• Fixes an issue where videos recorded at 4K 60 while the device is warm could experience stutter while scrubbing the video playback in Photos.
• Fixes an issue where digital car keys may not unlock or start a vehicle with passive entry after restoring from a backup or transferring directly from another iPhone.

iOS 18.1 will be released to the general public on October 28, 2024, a week after the roll-out of Monday’s release candidate version. While AirPods Pro 2 will receive a new hearing aid feature with the release, the main focus of iOS 18.1 is Apple Intelligence, which makes it possible to edit and summarize text or modify images through the use of generative AI software.

It’s worth pointing out, however, that Apple Intelligence features are only available for devices with an A17 Pro chip or newer, or iPad and Mac devices with an M1 or newer Apple Silicon chip.

While iOS 18.1 introduces a number of Apple Intelligence features, such as email categorization and summarization, Smart Replies, and Writing Tools, some AI-related enhancements, such as Image Playground, will only make their debut with future iOS releases later in 2024.