Dawn Chmielewski:
Joswiak acknowledged the mistake in the initial update of Apple’s iOS 8 mobile operating system — but said the problem resided in how the software was “wrapped,” not with the update itself.
“It had to do with the way the software was being sent over servers,” Joswiak told Re/code on Tuesday at the Code/Mobile conference in Half Moon Bay, Calif. “It was the way software was being distributed.”
Federico Viticci:
For the past week, apps like MindNode, Twitterrific, Pixelmator, and (before the latest update) Drafts have been hanging or crashing at launch on my devices, forcing me to force-quit them, reboot (with a hard reset), or manually copy data because iCloud wasn’t syncing. Each app was tested with existing document libraries as well as an empty database.
In short, apps using iCloud data will freeze or just crash at launch for many users. I’m seeing it all over the place in my iPhone 6, and like Fraser Speirs, can’t use apps like Keynote. Infuriating and pathetic.
Jason Snell:
This is the promise of the 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K Display: It’s one of the fastest Macs ever attached to the best Mac display ever. Yes, it’s an iMac, meaning you can’t attach a newer, faster computer to this thing in two or three years. But I have a feeling that these iMacs will have the processor power, and the staying power, to make the aging process much less painful.
Colin Lecher at The Verge:
FBI Director James Comey has been on a media tour lately, making an anti-encryption pitch to the public. Apple’s new encryption standards, Comey has argued, are an unnecessary hurdle to law enforcement — and the FBI needs an easy way to bypass them. Now Comey is bringing the argument straight to Congress, asking them to update a law to allow backdoors in smartphones.
Screw you, Mr. Comey.
Want.
Speaking of this year’s iPads, Dan Frommer has rounded up Tim Cook’s comments on the iPad from today’s quarterly results call. This jumped out at me:
What you do see is that people hold onto their iPads longer than they do a phone. And because we’ve only been in this business four years, we don’t really know what the upgrade cycle will be for people. So that’s a difficult thing to call.
Apple’s selling a lot of iPads currently:
That’s a crapton of iPads. I think the lineup is potentially confusing to customers, and I think there are a lot of factors as to why Apple’s done this.
I think it’s become clear that the iPad is not an upgrade-every-year class of device, but without going to a 5/5S-style naming and upgrade scheme, Apple’s sending mixed messages about what it thinks customers want.
Sigh:
We’re starting to feel like the locks on our apartment changed and we weren’t given the new keys…
Apple:
Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2014 fourth quarter ended September 27, 2014. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $42.1 billion and quarterly net profit of $8.5 billion, or $1.42 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $37.5 billion and net profit of $7.5 billion, or $1.18 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 38 percent compared to 37 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 60 percent of the quarter’s revenue.
Federico Viticci:
iOS 8.1 brings bug fixes, speed improvements, and interface changes, but it also enables Continuity features such as Text Message Forwarding and Instant Hotspot, allowing iOS devices to better integrate with each other and Macs running OS X Yosemite. With iOS 8.1, Apple is opening access to its iCloud Photo Library beta – an iCloud service that stores all your photos from all your devices, in a single library that relays changes to every device. And last, iOS 8.1 marks the debut of Apple Pay, the company’s new payment service that rolls out in the US today.
Yeah, Apple isn’t moving too fast. No way.
Thomas Brand:
The new Mac mini (Late 2014) has no upgradable Memory. Its 4, 8, or 16 GBs of 1600MHz LPDDR3 are soldered to the logic board. A suction cup is required to remove the Bottom Cover. Six T6 security screws are required to remove the Antenna Plate. Each security screw must be replaced before the Mac mini can be reassembled.
This is disappointing, especially as the form factor didn’t change. I would have expected this from a radically different design, but that’s not what we got. The insides may be updated (like that PCIe SSD), but the shell of the Mac mini only changed to make it more difficult to work on.