Benjamin Mayo

Following a Bloomberg report detailing the upcoming iPad roadmap, Jon Prosser has shared renders based on sources about the design of the upcoming iPad mini.

Prosser says that the sixth-generation iPad mini features almost the same chassis dimensions as the fifth-generation iPad mini. However, the design is radically new with the removal of the home button in favor of a Touch ID power button, larger display and proportionally smaller display bezels, as well as replacing the Lightning port with USB-C.

‘SEE’ debuted at Apple TV+’s launch all the way back in November of 2019 but production on the second season of this post-apocalyptic show was halted because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, Apple is now ready to announce the season two release date: August 27. Sign up to Apple TV+ and rewatch the first season ahead of the second season premiere. This season, Dave Bautista (Edo Voss) accompanies Jason Momoa (Baba Voss) in the lead role.

The Eurasian Economic Commission requires that all hardware using encryption technology is registered in its database. As usual, this year’s iPhone models have been added to the filings a few months ahead of their public announcement.

Consomac spotted the addition of new model identifiers A2628, A2630, A2634, A2635, A2640, A2643, and A2645. The iPhone 13 lineup is expected to launch in the fall, around September.

There were many rumors about a new MacBook Pro coming at WWDC, but it (sadly) didn’t happen. However, metadata attached to the WWDC keynote video indicates that Apple might actually have been planning to launch the new MacBook Pro this week after all.

In the keyword tags for Apple’s official WWDC YouTube video, the terms ‘m1x’ and ‘ M1X MacBook Pro’ can be found. This was first spotted by Max Balzer on Twitter.

Apple TV+ has officially announced its sci-fi series ‘Invasion’, which has been in production for almost two years — shooting was naturally delayed due to the pandemic.

The show follows characters across several continents preparing for an alien invasion. It will premiere on October 22nd, 2021.

Following many days of frustration from customers, HBO Max has today reverted the recent app update on Apple TV. The app once again uses the tvOS native video player which should enable customers using Apple TV with the Siri Remote to be able to successfully pause, fast forward and rewind once more.

HBO says restoring the native tvOS system player is a first step, albeit one that should address the majority of the recent customer complaints, with more improvements to the overall playback experience to follow in the future.

Apple TV+ today released its latest sizzle reel for the service, advertising what subscribers can expect from the service in the coming months.

The featured titles includes returning seasons of Ted Lasso, The Morning Show, See and Truth Be Told. New premium originals include Foundation, Invasion, The Shrink Next Door as well as the Sundance winning film CODA.

Update: Fastly says it has identified a fix and websites are gradually coming back online.

Many large websites are currently down due to a major CDN issue. The issue appears to be rooted at the Fastly CDN network.

Websites currently experiencing issues include Amazon, Reddit, Spotify, and The New York Times. Some websites are completely unavailable, whereas others are having issues loading assets like fonts or images.

Here’s a funny one: iOS 15 lets you place multiple copies of the same app on Springboard. This means you can have the same app duplicated across your home screens, as many times as you want.

Taken to the extreme like in the screenshot above, you can fill your entire iPhone screen with the same app across every app row and the dock. This may just look like a funny bug on the surface, but it’s actually intended …

As part of iOS 15, Apple announced a handful of new video and audio effects that help boost your camera and mic quality, especially for videoconferencing. Features include Portrait video (background blur) mode and voice isolation microphone adjustments.

In the keynote, these features were presented as being available inside of FaceTime. It turns out that Apple has implemented these effects system-wide and are automatically available for third-party apps too, like when taking a photo in Snapchat or having a video call in Zoom.

With iOS 15, your iPhone is still traceable through the Find My network even when the device is powered off. It seems that with iOS 15, the phone is not really fully ‘powered off’, it stays in a low-power state and acts like an AirTag, allowing any nearby iOS device to pick up the Bluetooth signal and send back its location.

This also means if your iPhone runs out of battery during the day, you still have a chance of finding its location for several more hours. In fact, Apple says the location tracking will even keep working whilst the phone is reset to factory settings with Activation Lock enabled.

After being unceremoniously removed in iOS 13, Apple has restored the magnifying glass (loupe) when interacting with text on iOS 15.

Now, when a user starts to move the text cursor, a bubble appears above their finger magnifying what is shown below. This makes it really easy to see where the text cursor is being placed, and where text will be inserted.

On first launch of iOS 15, your iPhone and iPad now feature a cute welcome animation dating back to the classic ‘hello’ Mac font.

This animation shows only the first time a user updates to iOS 15, and cycles between various handwriting scripts of ‘hello’ in different languages.

For the first time, Apple will allow users to stay on the previous major version when iOS 15 ships in the fall. Users will have the choice to stay on iOS 14 and receive important security updates, or upgrade to iOS 15 to take advantage of all the new features.

iOS always has high levels of adoption from its user base, but some groups prefer not to upgrade right away. With this new feature in place, those people will no longer miss out on bug fixes and security updates.

Apple today announced its own continuous integration system called ‘Xcode Cloud’. Xcode Cloud allows developers to commit code which is then built on Apple’s servers. Test suites can then be performed in parallel whilst the local developer continues to do other things.

Apple is also bringing TestFlight to the Mac for the first time. This allows developers to easily distribute beta builds of their software to a test pool of users.

As part of WWDC today, Apple announced the next major version of its desktop operating system, macOS Monterey. The Shortcuts app is now available on the Mac to achieve ‘peak productivity’. Safari is getting a new design including an integrated tab bar, that sits alongside the search field.

Universal Control allows you to more easily use an iPad with a Mac, as your keyboard and mouse seamlessly moves over to each device. You can even drag and drop between your connected devices.

With iOS 15, Siri will now be able to handle a variety of requests without an Internet connection. This means requests like setting timers or switching apps can be performed without any communication with a server, making the experience faster and more responsive.

Apple is also launching a new privacy provision whereby audio recorded by Siri never leaves the local device.

For the first time, you can code, iterate and build apps on the iPad itself. Using Swift Playgrounds on iPadOS 15, customers will be able to create iPhone and iPad apps from scratch and then deploy them to the App Store.

It remains to be seen how limited or not the development experience will be. It is probably notable that Apple chose not to rebrand this as ‘Xcode’, signifying that you aren’t going to be able to do everything you can do with Xcode on the Mac.

As part of iOS 15, Apple AirPods headphones are getting new features. You can boost the sound of other people when in a busy environment, and now AirPods can speak notifications to you as well as incoming phone calls and messages.

There are also improvements to Find My integration to make it easier to find your lost buds.