Benjamin Mayo

Apple has today started a replacement program for the iPhone XS Smart Battery Case and the iPhone XR Smart Battery Case. Apple says that units sold from January 2019 through October 2019 may experience charging issues due to a fault.

Affected units may exhibit issues like intermittent charging when plugged into power or the case simply not charging the iPhone at all. If you own one of these cases, you are now eligible to get a free replacement.

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Apple is launching a donation campaign to help with efforts in Australia to fight back the devastating bushfires. Once again, Apple is partnering with the Red Cross.

Customers can make Red Cross donations simply through the iTunes and App Store, using their associated payment method. Apple does not collect any commission or processing fees, 100% of donations go to the charity.

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Apple today announced that it set a new single day record for the App Store, with $386 million worth of sales on New Year’s Day, an increase of 20% over last year. The App Store also set a new record for sales between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, with $1.42 billion in revenue.

Apple announced the numbers as part of a press release that looked back on Apple’s “landmark” year of services offerings.

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Apple entered the 2010s just as the iPhone began to explode in popularity. The iPhone became the most successful consumer product, ever. Sales surged for another five years and still make up a majority of Apple’s revenues. However, we exit the decade with the iPhone making up a smaller portion of Apple’s business than ever before, as the company diversifies into strong lineups of wearables, tablets and services offerings.

But nothing is a simple straight line. Apple had to graduate through the passing of its founder, juggle relationships with an ever-expanding list of consumer and professional market segments, and adapt to the public attention and scrunity that only comes along as a consequence of being the biggest company in the world. This is a decade in Apple, on one page.

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In Ming-Chi Kuo’s most recent report, the analyst said Apple is looking to launch four 5G-compatible iPhone models in 2020 but would not be drawn on their exact specification. The two competing standards for 5G work on either mmWave and sub-6 GHz spectrum, and devices can support one or the other, or both.

A report today from analysts at Susquehanna claims that Apple will only launch sub-6 GHz compatible 5G phones in 2020. mmWave models may not be available until 2021 in small volumes.

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In a report from Flurry Analytics, Apple was the winner of the holiday gift season with the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and a healthy mix of older models contributing to the company’s dominance over every other manufacturer, in the United States at least.

For the period Christmas Day through New Year’s Eve, Apple iPhones and iPads represented about 43% of all mobile device activations in the US, according to the report.

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After several false starts, IKEA is finally ready to offer HomeKit support for its inexpensive line of Tradfri smart blinds. The update is rolling out now, although not all Tradfri owners are seeing the necessary firmware update just yet.

The category of HomeKit blinds has been a thing for a while now, but the IKEA range has been hotly anticipated due to their affordability. The Fyrtur range cost between $129 and $179. You’ll also need the IKEA Tradfri hub in order to control the blinds via HomeKit though.

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Once again, TSMC appears set to be the exclusive supplier of Apple’s custom iPhone SoC chip designs. Digitimes reports that the foundry will begin manufacturing the A14 chip for this year’s iPhones in the second quarter.

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Within 5 years, Apple could send data to your iPhone directly from the Earth’s atmosphere. At least, that appears to be its goal according to a new report from Bloomberg.

The company is said to be hiring software, hardware, and aerospace engineers to find new methods of data transfer for the iPhone and its other fleet of consumer products.

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Apple today announced that Mythic Quest, Apple TV+’s first scripted comedy series, will debut on the platform February 7.

The show stars Rob McElhenney as the creative director of a video game studio. All nine episodes will be available on the premiere date.

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Just before the holidays, the Pixelmator Pro team have pushed out another update with an impressive new image resizing algorithm, powered by a machine learning model.

Pixelmator Pro are calling it ‘ML Super Resolution’. It’s a new scaling mode that can allow you to increase images without the blurriness you come to expect when you make a bitmap image larger than its original size.

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The iPhone 11 Pro triple-camera system re-established Apple’s crown as a critic’s choice this year for smartphone cameras, but Marques Brownlee’s blind Twitter survey always turns up some interesting results.

Last year, the iPhone lost to a BlackBerry … and for 2019, the iPhone 11 Pro didn’t make it past the first round losing to a photo taken by the OnePlus 7T Pro.

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Apple TV+ is expanding its franchises beyond the raw TV episodes of the shows.

Sesame Workshop is now releasing books to coincide with the Ghostwriter Apple TV+ series. Ghostwriter-branded versions of Alice in Wonderland and The Jungle Book are out now. The cover of each book features prominent branding including a ‘Watch Ghostwriter on Apple TV+’ sticker.

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