Tag: APPLE

Apple fell to the altar, the media summarized 10 major mistakes in 2018

In 2018, for Apple, it can be said to be “Heaven and Hell”. Apple’s market value once broke through 1 trillion US dollars and became the world’s largest enterprise. However, after the release of iPhone XS/XR, the stock price went down all the way, coupled with slow sales and production cuts. After the bad air attack, there has not been a rebound. The technology website iFuun reported that foreign media summarized Apple’s top ten mistakes in 2018, or poor product design or marketing decisions, which allowed Apple to “go down the altar.”

 

First: The iPhone XS series has changed too little. The design of the iPhone XS series is almost the same as that of the iPhone X. It is only a new golden style and a 6.5-inch Max. Although the 2018 is Apple’s “S” small upgrade year, it is a radical mobile phone for Chinese mobile phone manufacturers such as Huawei and OPPO. Under the design, Apple’s conservative nature is dwarfed, and ultimately, it also reflects sales.

 

Second: iPhone SE is discontinued. The iPhone SE discontinued by foreign media evaluation is one of Apple’s most wrong decisions this year, because it personally ended one of Apple’s most affordable iPhone. In addition, Apple’s move is undoubtedly giving up those who like small screen phones.

 

Third: iOS 12 upgrade is not big. In terms of software, iOS 12 has almost no change compared to iOS 11. Apple’s explanation is to increase stability, enhance the user experience, and add new features such as Siri shortcuts. However, these new features are not obvious and have not been achieved. effect.

 

Fourth: iPad Pro is still not a real computer. Unlike the iPhone, the iPad Pro has received major updates this year, canceling the Home button, adding a Face ID, and the full screen design looks beautiful. However, compared with its high price, the iPad Pro is still not a real computer, can not complete the heavy operation, and is less practical than the Surface Pro 6.

 

Fifth: The new MacBook Air design changes are too small. The MacBook Air was finally updated in 2018. The screen frame is narrower and the new processor is upgraded. However, the change is limited to this. People are actually looking forward to a brand new Air.

 

Sixth: HomePod lost to Amazon Echo. HomePod was released in February this year and is a brand new hardware category for Apple. However, compared to Amazon Echo, it is just a follower, although the sound quality is excellent, but wisdom as a smart speaker, and the high price is also prohibitive.

 

Seventh: Siri is still too stupid. In the era of Jobs, Siri debuted with the iPhone 4s and became the first AI voice assistant. However, after so many years, Siri is still a little poor, completely compared to Amazon Alexa, Google assistants and even Xiaomi Xiaoai students, is Apple’s most tasteless software service.

 

Eighth: Black Friday promotion is too small. The foreign media believes that in the case of Apple’s new product price increase in 2018, the “Black Five” discount activity is too stingy, and basically does not provide any meaningful discount. For example, the $50 discount is limited to the old iPhone 7/8 series, and the new machine cannot be used.

 

Ninth: No AirPods 2 and AirPower. AirPods is Apple’s most successful product launched in recent years, and its popularity is higher than that of the iPhone. However, in 2018, Apple did not publish AirPods 2 as expected, and its wireless charger AirPower continued to be difficult to produce, giving a very bad impression.

 

Tenth: The price of new products is too expensive. Finally, the 2018 new Apple new product has a drawback is too expensive. Whether it is iPhone XS, XR or iPad Pro, new Apple Watch and notebooks, the price increase is at least 20%. Although there are inflation and material labor costs, there is no technology manufacturer like Apple that keeps the old design and raises the price sharply, so it is not surprising that the sales volume has dropped.

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Guo Minghao: Apple will update Face ID and iPhone antenna design next year

On November 10, 2018, analyst Guo Minghao released an investor forecast report related to the new iPhone antenna technology. He predicted that Apple will replace the antenna material and design, and will add a new Face ID to the iPhone released in 2019.

 

In the report, Guo Minghao mentioned the liquid crystal polymer LCP antenna technology that Apple used on iPhone X. The production process of such an antenna is also complicated, and there are fewer suppliers that can be produced. In the face of this situation, Apple’s control over the price is also limited. Faced with this situation, Apple will probably add a polyimide (MPI) technology antenna to the new iPhone released next year.

MPI antennas are not as “fragile” as LCP antennas, and production costs are lower than LCP. And because production requirements are lower than LCP, there are five suppliers that offer MPI antennas, more than LCP. In this case, when Apple talks with suppliers about the price, the space will be larger than before, and the cost has the opportunity to be controlled.

Although there are points of view, LCP is better than MPI antenna in performance stability and power consumption control. However, some analysts pointed out that the performance of the MPI antenna is also improving, and the performance gap between the two will not be too large.

 

In this regard, Guo Mingxi also indicated that Apple’s replacement should not have much impact. Instead, he is more optimistic about the MPI antenna in the report, thinking that this antenna will become the mainstream antenna for future iPhone models.

He expects that the 2019 iPhone will use a combination of four MPI antennas and two LCP antennas to replace the current six LCP antennas.

 

In addition to the antenna, Guo Minghao expects Apple to update Face ID. The update will improve the iPhone’s recognition ability in the dark environment. The new version of Face ID will appear in the new iPhone released next year.

What Do the AI Chips in New Smartphones Actually Do?

Artificial intelligence is coming to your phone. The iPhone X has a Neural Engine as part of its A11 Bionic chip; the Huawei Kiri 970 chip has what’s called a Neural Processing Unit or NPU on it; and the Pixel 2 has a secret AI-powered imaging chip that just got activated. So what exactly are these next-gen chips designed to do?

As mobile chipsets have grown smaller and more sophisticated, they’ve started to take on more jobs and more different kinds of jobs. Case in point, integrated graphics—GPUs now sit alongside CPUs at the heart of high-end smartphones, handling all the heavy lifting for the visuals so the main processor can take a breather or get busy with something else.

The new breed of AI chips are very similar—only this time the designated tasks are recognizing pictures of your pets rather than rendering photo-realistic FPS backgrounds.

What we talk about when we talk about AI

AI, or artificial intelligence, means just that. The scope of the term tends to shift and evolve over time, but broadly speaking it’s anything where a machine can show human-style thought and reasoning.

A person hidden behind a screen operating levers on a mechanical robot is artificial intelligence in the broadest sense—of course today’s AI is way beyond that, but having a programmer code responses into a computer system is just a more advanced version of getting the same end result (a robot that acts like a human).

As for computer science and the smartphones in your pocket, here AI tends to be more narrowly defined. In particular it usually involves machine learning, the ability for a system to learn outside of its original programming, and deep learning, which is a type of machine learning that tries to mimic the human brain with many layers of computation. Those layers are called neural networks, based on the neural networks inside our heads.

So machine learning might be able to spot a spam message in your inbox based on spam it’s seen before, even if the characteristics of the incoming email weren’t originally coded into the filter—it’s learned what spam email is.

Deep learning is very similar, just more advanced and nuanced, and better at certain tasks, especially in computer vision—the “deep” bit means a whole lot more data, more layers, and smarter weighting. The most well-known example is being able to recognize what a dog looks like from a million pictures of dogs.

Plain old machine learning could do the same image recognition task, but it would take longer, need more manual coding, and not be as accurate, especially as the variety of images increased. With the help of today’s superpowered hardware, deep learning (a particular approach to machine learning, remember), is much better at the job.

To put it another way, a machine learning system would have to be told that cats had whiskers to be able to recognize cats. A deep learning system would work out that cats had whiskers on its own.

Bear in mind that an AI expert could write a volume of books on the concepts we’ve just covered in a couple of paragraphs, so we’ve had to simplify it, but those are the basic ideas you need to know.

AI chips on smartphones

As we said at the start, in essence, AI chips are doing exactly what GPU chips do, only for artificial intelligence rather than graphics—offering a separate space where calculations particularly important for machine learning and deep learning can be carried out. As with GPUs and 3D graphics, AI chips give the CPU time to focus on other tasks, and reduces battery draw at the same time. In also means your data is more secure, because less of it has to be sent off to the cloud for processing.

So what does this mean in the real world? It means image recognition and processing could be a lot faster. For instance, Huawei claims that its NPU can perform image recognition on 2,000 pictures every second, which the company also claims is 20 times faster than it would take with a standard CPU.

More specifically, it can perform 1.92 teraflops, or a trillion floating point operations per second, when working with 16-bit floating point numbers. As opposed to integers or whole numbers, floating point numbers—with decimal points—are crucial to the calculations running through the neural networks involved with deep learning.

Apple calls its AI chip, part of the A11 Bionic chip, the Neural Engine. Again, it’s dedicated to machine learning and deep learning tasks—recognizing your face, recognizing your voice, recording animojis, and recognizing what you’re trying to frame in the camera. It can handle some 600 billion operations per second, Apple claims.

App developers can tap into this through Core ML, and easy plug-and-play way of incorporating image recognition and other AI algorithms. Core ML doesn’t require the iPhone X to run, but the Neural Engine handles these types of tasks faster. As with the Huawei chip, the time spend offloading all this data processing to the cloud should be vastly reduced, theoretically improving performance and again lessening the strain on battery life.

And that’s really what these chips are about: Handling the specific types of programming tasks that machine learning, deep learning, and neural networks rely on, on the phone, faster than the CPU or GPU can manage. When Face ID works in a snap, you’ve likely got the Neural Engine to thank.

Is this the future? Will all smartphone inevitably come with dedicated AI chips in future? As the role of artificial intelligence on our handsets grows, the answer is likely yes. Qualcomm chips can already use specific parts of the CPU for specific AI tasks, and separate AI chips is the next step. Right now these chips are only being utilized for a small subsection of tasks, but their importance is going to only grow.

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Apple bows to mounting pressure, offers $29 battery replacements to regain trust

A week after it was first revealed Apple was slowing down older iPhones, ostensibly to stabilize performance, the company has succumbed to mounting pressure and, as an apparent gesture of goodwill, is offering owners of an iPhone 6 and later models a battery replacement for $29 — a limited-time $50 discount.

You are likely familiar with the rumor that Apple throttles older iPhones in an effort to make users resort to buying new devices. Of course, Apple maintains that’s not the case and it offered a statement regarding why iPhones may struggle as they get older.

Apple confirmed it slowed down older iPhones in an effort to better handle the power output that aging batteries can offer. Some users were upset. So much, in fact, that several lawsuits have been filed against the company.

“Defendant breached the implied contracts it made with Plaintiffs and Class Members by purposefully slowing down older iPhone models when new models come out and by failing to properly disclose that at the time the parties entered into an agreement,” reads a lawsuit filed by Wilshire Law Firm on behalf of Stefan Bogdanovich and Dakota Speas. The pair are seeking both California and nationwide class action status for their suit, according to a report from TMZ.

Apple Insider has reported that attorneys on behalf of Keaton Harvey have filed another suit against Apple. The class-action suit alleges that the company’s decision to slow down old iPhones “allowed Apple to conceal the true nature and scope of the battery defect and to avoid expending time, money, and effort on correcting it.”

The suit requests that Apple notify owners about changes to the OS, repair the flaws in the software that led to the throttling, and reimburse those who bought affected iPhones.

In light of the suits, on Thursday, December 28, Apple released an apology for the confusion surrounding battery and performance issues. In its apology, the company stated “we have never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades. Our goal has always been to create products that our customers love, and making iPhones last as long as possible is an important part of that.”

Apple also promised to release a software update in 2018 that will allow users to better monitor battery performance and health on their devices. Additionally, it stated it will reduce the price of battery replacement on all iPhone 6 phones and later to $29 for the next year.

Recent throttling accusations first appeared a couple of weeks ago, when a Redditor shared Geekbench results take right before and right after the battery in an iPhone 6S was replaced. According to the Redditor, who goes by the name TeckFire, the iPhone performed as much as 20 percent better after the battery replacement.

After the Reddit post, John Poole, who founded Primate Labs, offered a more visualized look at the link between battery health and iPhone performance. Benchmarking tests were performed on iOS 10.2.0 and 10.2.1, and show some pretty serious differences in performance. Apple introduced an update in iOS 10.2.1 aimed at fixing an issue where some iPhone 6S models shut down, thanks to uneven power delivery from older batteries in the phones. That power management feature is what was causing the performance dips on some iPhone models.

According to Apple, there is a good reason for the performance dip.

“Lithium-ion batteries become less capable of supplying peak current demands when in cold conditions, have a low battery charge, or as they age over time, which can result in the device unexpectedly shutting down to protect its electronic components,” Apple said in a statement to TechCrunch.

In other words, when an iPhone’s battery gets older, it becomes less capable of delivering enough power to the processor during a peak of performance, and when that happens it has to spread out the power requests over a few processor cycles. The result of that is a dip in performance.

That’s what is triggered when benchmarks are run — they look like performance peaks and valleys to an operating system, and as such on older batteries the power requests will be spread out. Upgrade to a new battery, and power will be delivered much more effectively.

It’s not all that surprising. As a battery ages, it stops working as well. That has always been the case and likely always will be. That doesn’t mean that the average performance of a device is being affected, nor does it mean that Apple is throttling your phone to make you upgrade. OF course, Apple could have been a little more transparent — a simple notification telling users that their battery is getting old and that they may see a performance dip because of it would go a long way. That lack of notification may be a serious point of contention when and if the new lawsuit ever gains ground.

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FACIAL RECOGNITION: ANDROID MANUFACTURERS ARE CHASING AFTER APPLE

The iPhone X has yet to hit the market, so nobody knows how well Face ID actually works. However, buzz around 3D facial recognition is making the vast majority of Android manufacturers nervous. This is only to be expected, given what we know about how the industry works.

As the experts at KGI have found out, face recognition using special 3D sensors is the current hot topic of the smartphone industry. According to the survey, since the presentation of the iPhone X, the search queries for the new 3D sensors used for face recognition have tripled. At the same time, interest in the “traditional” fingerprint sensor – which has only been used in smartphones for four years – is also declining rapidly.

It was obvious at the time of the presentation how this would go. It’s the same old story. The face recognition technology that – remember – has been available on smartphones for years, is presented by Apple and will then be adopted by the Android manufacturers. Like the fingerprint sensor, face recognition will be seen on an increasing number of Android smartphones in the coming months. That’s not very creative, but companies feel that their hands are forced by Apple’s market power and popularity.

Technology has got to be fun

By the way, Face ID is not just about facial recognition. The Animojis introduced by Apple with the new iPhones may seem silly at first, but they show that the technology can also be used for a lot of other things, even if it’s something silly-sounding like animated animal faces with their own facial expressions. Let’s face it: if a technology does not promise the masses a bit of fun, then it won’t make a splash in the market.

However, there is another side to this story: the unfulfilled hope of a breakthrough in some technologies, such as the “under-display” optical fingerprint sensor. The Galaxy S8 was already supposed have a sensor like this, but the engineers couldn’t implement it in time for release. As a result, Samsung users have to contort their fingers in search of the poorly placed sensor on the back – a lazy compromise. Similarly, Apple wanted to include a under-display fingerprint sensor in the iPhone X in order to offer an alternative to Face ID, but also ran out of time before their release deadline.

You won’t get anywhere without OLEDs

Such newfangled fingerprint sensors would probably not be available for the mass of consumers anyway, as the technology can only be used with OLED panels. This makes it difficult to provide mass-produced solutions outside of expensive, high-end smartphones, especially as Samsung enjoys a very dominant position in this area.

But fingerprint authentication, OLEDs displays, only serve to demonstrate once again what has always been reliable in the past: Apple doesn’t set any technical records on paper, but it sets the actual market trends. No matter what the Android competition does, if Apple starts off in one direction, then the others are compelled to follow.

Apple is technically ahead this time

This will not necessarily change if Samsung succeeds in actually getting the under-display fingerprint sensor to debut on Galaxy Note 9 for the first time, as a report by Business Insider suggests. It seems that facial recognition in the Samsung devices is much less advanced and less secure than in Apple. Business Insider states that Apple has an advantage of 18 to 30 months over Samsung when it comes to facial authentication. The new fingerprint sensor would thus only be a transitional solution until Samsung can catch up to Apple’s solution – which was also the case with the introduction of Touch ID.

It’s going to work like this: Samsung does it first, then Apple will make it better later, and only then does everyone else have to have it.

What do you think? Does the Android competition really have to follow every Apple trend? Or would a little more self-confidence do good here?

Apple is ‘looking into’ why some iPhone 8 batteries are swelling

Apple seems to have an iPhone 8 battery problem on its hands, and it’s not clear yet whether it’s occurring in just a handful of edge cases or in a larger batch of phones.

Over the past week, reports have been coming out about iPhone 8s that have split apart either on arrival or after several days of use. What appears to be happening is that the battery inside the phone is swelling, bending the front of the phone and separating it from the body of the device. So far, there haven’t been any fires — just ruined phones.

Apple has a short statement on the matter: “We are aware and looking into it.”

The first report came out of Taiwan, where a woman is said to have found her iPhone swollen apart after plugging it in to charge. Someone in Japan then posted photos of a split-apart phone on Twitter. And in the days since, there’ve been cases in China, Canada, and Greece.

There appear to be only six or so reports so far — certainly less than a dozen that have been publicly identified — so the issue seems to be quite small in comparison to the millions of phones that Apple has likely already sold. In any manufacturing run that big, there are going to be occasional issues, so on some level seeing a few broken iPhones is expected.

But after Samsung’s Note 7 fiasco, there’s reason to be concerned about what’s happening here — especially since it’s a battery issue. Batteries shouldn’t be swelling in any number, and it’s not clear what the half-dozen iPhones that are having this problem have in common. While it seems to be rare, there’s obviously good reason to want to know what’s going on.

“[Swelling is] very unusual for a brand-new battery and leads toward the direction of there’s something fundamentally wrong with this battery,” says Sam Jaffe, managing director of Cairn Energy Research Advisors, in a phone call with The Verge. Jaffe, a battery industry analyst, says manufacturers have reached a limit with lithium-ion battery capacity and could end up producing designs with a bigger risk of short circuiting in an attempt to store more power.

For now, he says, it’s too early to know what’s happening with Apple’s phones. “It could be just a random distribution,” he says. “Just a random event, and it’s only a few.”

Jaffe suspects Apple’s executives are “in crisis mode” over the potential damage that battery issues could lead to. But while we’ve seen a few swollen batteries already, he says, it doesn’t mean the problem will necessarily elevate into a Note 7-style crisis with phones starting to produce smoke.

“Swelling is always a precursor when there is a battery fire, but the percentage of actual fires are pretty rare,” Jaffe says. “In the Galaxy Note case, there were probably a couple hundred battery failures of one sort or another, but there were only a handful of fires — so that gives you a sense of the proportion of actual fires.”

How to downgrade iOS 11

If you’ve upgraded to iOS 11 and got cold feet, it’s possible to downgrade, but only if you’re quick.

There are two main ways to do it, one of which requires you to have a backup and the other which – fortunately – doesn’t. Here we’ll explain how to downgrade iOS 11.

How to downgrade iOS: Method 1 – no backup needed*

* You may lose your text messages, but all other settings and apps will remain after the downgrade

  1. Download the appropriate IPSW file for your iPhone or iPad.
  2. Make sure iTunes on your computer is the latest version. If not, download and install it.
  3. Connect your iPhone or iPad to your computer and then click on your device when it appears.
  4. Under the Summary section, click the Check for Updates button while holding Shift (Windows) or Option (Mac).
  5. Now navigate to and choose the IPSW file you downloaded.
  6. Your device will be ‘updated’ to iOS 10.

As we said, the process will downgrade your phone or iPad without deleting all your stuff, but you will lose any text messages. So next time you upgrade, either make a full backup or don’t upgrade!

How to downgrade iOS: Method 2 – using a backup you already have

Not unreasonably, Apple doesn’t encourage downgrading to a previous version of iOS, but it is possible.

Currently Apple’s servers are still signing iOS 10.3.3. You can’t go back any further, unfortunately, which could be an issue if your most recent backup was made while running an older version of iOS (even version 10.3.2).

Let’s be clear: you can only restore a backup which was made while your phone or tablet was running iOS 10.3.3.

Our Macworld UK colleagues have a great guide to how to back up an iPhone, here. The key thing is to make sure you always have an up-to-date full backup, which is why it’s best to do a full password-protected backup via iTunes. You can also back up to iCloud to get a second chance of recovering your contacts, photos and other things.

Step 1.

To reinstall iOS 10 you need the relevant .ipsw file for your model of iPhone or iPad. Older versions won’t work as they’re not being ‘signed’ – or approved – by Apple’s servers.

(Mac users, if the ipsw file is stored on your Mac hard drive you can find it by following the path youruserfolder/Library/iTunes/ and then within a folder called iPad Software Updates, iPhone Software Updates or iPad Software Updates.)

If you can’t find the latest one on your Mac, or your a PC user, simply run a search for ‘download ipsw’ and select and download the appropriate file for your device. There are plenty of sites to choose from, including https://ipsw.me/ which helpfully tells you which versions are currently being signed.

Step 2.

Note: If you’re reading this after the final version of iOS 11 is release to the public you will have only a short time to downgrade (in past years as little as one week after the initial release date – not the date on which you upgraded) before it becomes impossible without a jailbroken phone.

Disable the Find My iPhone/iPad feature on the device if you’ve enabled it. You’ll find it in Settings > iCloud.

Plug in to your PC or Mac your iPhone or iPad. Launch iTunes. Click on your device in the iTunes interface and select Summary. Now hold down the Alt/Option key (Shift on a PC), and click the Restore iPhone button.

Now navigate to the IPSW file on your desktop and click Open. Your PC will now reinstall iOS 10.3.3 on your iPad or iPhone. Or it should…

Go into Recovery mode

If iTunes says you’re already running the latest version of iOS on your device, you may need to use Recovery mode. Completely power off the device, plug one end of the syncing cable into your computer and hold down the Home button on the iPhone/iPad while you connect the cable to it. When the ‘Connect to iTunes’ screen appears, release the Home button.

Restore your backup

If you have managed to go back, you’ll have a near-blank iPhone with none of your stuff on it. That’s where the backup you made comes in.

In iTunes click the Restore iPhone… button and choose the appropriate backup. It may take an hour or so, but your phone will be back to the way it was when you made the backup.

If you have no backup, you’ll have to sync music, videos and other content from iTunes or iCloud. You can then go to the App Store and download anything you’ve previously purchased after logging in with your Apple ID.