Over the past ten years, Apple’s iPhone has become the company’s most valuable —and recently, somewhat volatile— asset. Since its introduction in 2007, the iPhone helped to jumpstart the smartphone revolution, and with it came some big innovations. The App Store, touchscreen gaming, the mass adoption of social media, and protecting user data with biometrics. Its product lineup is enmeshed in Apple’s ecosystem, and the impact that it continues to have around the globe is vast.
The folks at 404 Media are reporting on leaked documents revealing the capabilities of Graykey, a tool that law enforcement uses to hack into seized phones. From the looks of it, Graykey can only retrieve some data from the iPhone 12 and newer, whereas it’s possible to recover “full” info from an iPhone 11. The cat and mouse game continues.
As spotted by TechCrunch, researcher Jiska Classen posted a video showing that iOS 18 will reboot your iPhone after three days of inactivity. The security feature, which 404 Media originally reported on, is apparently making it more difficult for police to break into suspects’ phones.
The Resident Evil 2 remake’s Apple App Store release is officially December 10th, Capcom announced. (Before, it was December 31st.)
As spotted by 9to5Mac, the second iOS 18.2 beta introduces the ability to press and hold the Camera Control button to keep focus and exposure. You can currently use the Camera Control button to quickly snap photos and adjust settings (but not lock them).
The new iPhone has two new buttons, stoves and washing machines are getting new knobs, and automakers are getting blowback for porting too many controls through the touchscreen. Rachel Plotnick, an associate professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington and author of the book Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing, explains why we may be experiencing a re-buttoning renaissance.
But on the other hand, people seem to have a hunger for physical buttons, both because you don’t always have to look at them—you can feel your way around for them when you don’t want to directly pay attention to them—but also because they offer a greater range of tactility and feedback.
[IEEE Spectrum]
Indonesian authorities have officially banned iPhone 16 handsets in the country. Even handsets imported from abroad are now deemed illegal, after a disagreement over Apple’s investment promises for Indonesia. Apple originally pledged to invested around $109 million in Indonesia, but has only invested around $95 million so far. The ban also includes the Apple Watch Series 10, as Indonesia is currently refusing to certify new Apple devices.
Om Malik did some interesting math on Siri usage:
I looked up the number of active Apple devices. That number is estimated to be 2.2 billion devices... So 1.5 billion requests a day is actually far less than one daily request per active device.
Malik says he hardly ever uses Siri on purpose. And now I’m thinking about my own Siri usage, which is definitely more than once a day but basically only for alarms and reminders. So I want to know: do you use your phone’s assistant consistently? If so, what for?
[On my Om]
The redesigned Mail app will automatically sort your emails into four different tabs: your primary inbox with all your important emails, a transactions section for online orders, a promotions category for marketing emails, and an updates tab for newsletters.
The iOS 18.2 beta also adds more AI features like Genmoji and an integration with ChatGPT.
Apple has confirmed that iOS 18.1 — and with it, the first phase of Apple Intelligence features — will roll out sometime next week. There’s been fair skepticism that these initial AI tricks won’t really move the needle despite Apple’s big advertising push.
But I must say, after a few weeks of receiving summarized notifications, I’d never want to go back to the old way.
In the wake of recent departures, Apple’s hardware head John Ternus has bumped three people to vice president positions— Richard Dinh, Dave Pakula, and Donny Nordhues — according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman today.
Dinh will head up the company’s iPhone road map. Ternus reportedly called Apple’s future models the “most ambitious in the product’s history” in a memo to the engineering team, Gurman writes.
Wanting to put its internals on display, YouTube’s Phone Repair Guru stripped an iPhone 16 Pro’s back panel down to the glass using a surprisingly complicated process. Gallium was even used to remove a thin layer of aluminum as the two metals react to create a soft alloy. The results look great, but maybe don’t try this mod at home.
With the latest iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia updates, wired gaming with an Xbox controller is now supported, even for devices with Lightning ports (using an adapter), MacRumors reports, giving Xbox-preferring gamers a way around latency and wireless interference.
Apple devices had previously supported PlayStation controllers but not Xbox, which MacRumors notes use a proprietary USB protocol, so support for it needed to be custom, as well.
