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Apple’s Fall Event 2018 : All About the New Launches

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Image Source: osxdaily.com

Apple’s annual event took place yesterday in San Francisco, California. The event was streaming live on the Apple TV and Apple’s event page, broadcast in London, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo and Sydney.

Apple, in its 2018 event, has announced a range of new iPhones along with its FDA-approved watch, that is capable of reading the heartbeat.

Apple’s new iPhone series includes the iPhone XS having a 5.8-inch OLED display screen, iPhone XS Max with 6.5-inch OLED display screen and iPhone XR with 6.1-inch Liquid Retina display Screen.

The iPhone XS and XS Max has come with a better camera resolution and are embedded with the faster A12 processor implanted in a stainless steel body. The new iPhones will support the eSim feature that will eliminate the need of inserting an extra sim card with the help of an inbuilt sim card.

On the other hand, the iPhone XR is having an aluminium body with a single 12MP wide angle back camera, providing the same depth-of-field effect. The iPhone XR has come with an improved battery with approximately 90 minutes more battery life. The iPhone XR will be available in six different colours black, white, blue, red, yellow, coral.

The price of the iPhone XS, XS Max and XR will start from $899 (Approx. 64,800), $999 (Approx. 72000) and $749 (54000), respectively. All the three phones will be available in a storage range of 64GB, 256GB and 512GB, that will vary the price accordingly. And, finally, the new iPhones are going to have two sim card slot that can help in boosting its sale.

Another product that was introduced at the event is an edge-to-edge screen watch, with a thinner body and a 30% larger screen, an addition to the Apple Watch Series 4. The new Apple 4 series watch is a GPS-only cellular model watch that is redesigned with enhanced software and hardware. The watch is having a faster S4 processor and ECG/EKG monitor. The watch is capable of reading the heartbeat rhythm and can sense if the user has fallen. In such a situation the watch will make a call to the emergency asap.

The preorders for the iPhones as well as the watch will start from 14 September and will be available in the American markets from 21 September, this year.

Apple Announces an Online Portal to Cooperate with the Law Officials

News, Product, Product Management, Tech News / By
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Since our lives have been so attached to our smartphones and we have stored almost every personal data in our phones, the data security has become the main concern. Over the past few years, the cyber-crime has also made the law enforcement officials to request the user’s private data from the top tech companies. The tech companies also respond to those queries with a sense of responsibility.

On September 4, Apple wrote a letter to Sheldon Whitehouse, the Democrat from Rhode Island, regarding a web portal that will help the police to request the user data stored in the iCloud. Apple is going to launch the web portal by the end of the year. It will constitute a team of trainers that will train the police about which data to be obtained and how it can be obtained.

Apple said in the letter that last year it answered to 14000 law enforcement requests. Among which 231 requests were regarding the domestic emergency and were addressed within 20 minutes. Until now, the law enforcement officials requested the data through emails to an Apple law enforcement email account.

The online portal will be a more convenient and a centralized hub. It will help the police officials to make and track requests, easily. Apple has created a set of strict guidelines on how and which data can be obtained. Apple has already trained over 1000 law enforcement officials that were trained in its training institutes. Now for further training, Apple is going to develop an online training program. The trainers from Apple will help the officials in the training and the training portals will be available globally.

Apple Pulls Out 25000 Illegal Apps From China’s App Store

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The news of Google re-entering into China has already created many controversies, even within the company resulting in a mass protest by its employees. Now again Apple, an American company is facing some regularity issues in China.

Noticeably, the State media broadcaster CCTV had recently criticised Apple for allowing many illegal apps on the App Store. The media has been giving a negative feedback to Apple for its no control over such apps. Apple has removed over 25000 apps from its App Store and allegedly, 4000 of them, were based on gambling. With the removal of these illegal apps, Apple has also removed those developers that distribute them.

Gambling is not allowed in China and most of these apps had used Gambling as a keyword. China media had criticised Apple for not doing enough to stop this kind of illegal activities. Apple has even made guidelines for uploading Apps on to the App store and has restricted these type of apps.

“Gambling apps are illegal and not allowed on the App Store in China,” Apple said in an emailed statement sent to Bloomberg on Monday. “We have already removed many apps and developers for trying to distribute illegal gambling apps on our App Store, and we are vigilant in our efforts to find these and stop them from being on the App Store.”

It is a tough task for an American company to maintain a business in world’s largest economy and Apple is trying hard to fall in line with Chinese authorities. Last year Apple pulled out nearly 700 VPN apps from its App Store. Apple has been entangled in conflicts with China in the past. Also, the growing friction between Washington, D.C. and Beijing is also causing the American companies in China to follow all the rules carefully to keep China on their side.

Apple’s new “Low Cost” MacBook Launch after 4 Years

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MacBook Air 2018
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It has been more than three years when Apple had launched its last Mac Book laptop in 2014. Also, the MacBook Air was upgraded with a faster processor last year, remaining the cheapest laptop by Apple. The MacBook Air is the only laptop by Apple, without a high-resolution screen, costing about $1000.

Reportedly, Apple is about to launch a new upgraded version of its MacBook, or it can be the upgraded version of MacBook Air. The launch may be by the end of this year, with the launch of other Apple products including the new iPhones and iPad.

Last year the MacBook sale went down by a large scale as the upgraded MacBook cost higher and could not meet the professional needs of the consumers. Since 2010, it sold the fewest number of its MacBooks in a quarter this year. The other companies like Lenovo and Acer also launched high-end laptops that attracted the customers with their new features.

By looking at the reduced sale of the MacBooks and desktop computers, last year, MacBook was planning to launch the new MacBook at the beginning of the year but got delayed. Later, it was set for June and July of this year, but again due to some production issues, the launch is now delayed for October 2018.

The new Apple laptop is going to be similar to the MacBook Air, but, added with a high-resolution, Retina-version display. The screen will be about 13 inches and will include thinner bezels around it. It will including the 14nm Kaby lake processors from Intel. The new MacBook is expected to be cheaper, that may result in the reduced storage for the basic models, up to 128 GB SSD reduced from 256 GB.

Apple considers its laptop and computer lineup as an important part of their company and will continue its production and sale. For now, Apple has not declared anything officially. But the trusting the sources, we can expect the launch of new MacBook by the fall of this year.

Jonathan Ive – Chief Design Officer Of Apple

Inspiration, Story / By

A passion to do something and following your heart can take you places. Who would have thought that just being fond of designing would make Jonathan Ive the Chief Design Officer of the world’s most leading tech giant: Apple? he is serving the company for last 22 years and has designed some beautiful and innovative products.

Early Life
Ive was born in Chingford and raised in Staffordshire on 27th February 1967 under the guidance of his father Jonathan Jony Ive who was a lecturer and silversmith by profession. Ive got interested in drawing at very early and tender age of 14. Inheriting the skills from his father he started designing from jewelry to furniture and cars to boats.

Finally, after meeting few experts Ive decided to take a product designing course and joined industrial design at Newcastle Polytechnic. A hearing aid designed by Ive is kept on display in the London Museum of Design. Ive slowly started getting into technology and especially designing products using a Mac computer.

Beginning of Career
After the completion of his course Ive co-founded Tangerine – a London based design firm designing household products like kitchen and bathroom appliances. And Ive’s journey for Apple began from here. As Apple was one of the client’s at Tangerine they wanted him to join Apple after being impressed with his work. Robert Burner, the industrial design chief of Apple, hired Ive in 1992 and just in the next five years became the Senior Vice President of Industrial Design. Ive worked hard on the products such as the Newton MessagePad 110, which was one of the forgotten Apple products. Ive was on the verge to quit Apple but Jon Rubinstein, senior vice president of hardware engineering, gave him a raise and persuaded him to stay.

The Leap
Good that Ive took Rubinstein’s advice and stayed because in the coming years he would design some of the most famous Apple products like 1998’s iMac, 2001’s iPod, 2007’s iPhone, and 2010’s iPad. These were the groundbreaking designs by Ive which raised the bar of his reputation higher and higher. The uniqueness of the designs brought by Apple made them stand out in the market and a lot of other companies even copied the designs. Ive’s latest design is the Apple Watch.

Under Steve Jobs, Ive was given complete freedom to explore new ideas and designs. After the death of Jobs, some additional responsibility was put on Ive’s shoulders including the handling of software along with the hardware. He also has a personal design lab and is one of the most secret areas at Apple’s headquarters. And only a handful of people can actually enter this personal lab.

Ive holds more than 730 US design and utility patents as of 2014. Many more patents are yet to arrive in the future. He was awarded various awards recognizing his work in the design field. Ive lives with his wife Heather Pegg and twin sons in the Pacific Heights district of San Francisco, California.

Ive believes in charity and has developed products like the Leica Camera and Jaeger-LeCoultre sports watch which were sold at auction for charitable trusts. He considered Steve Jobs to be his closest friend and Jobs considered him to be his ‘spiritual partner’ at Apple.

All You Need To Know About The iCloud Hack Story

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It’s a real tough to hack into an iPhone or Apple ID and that’s well established. But hackers find a way to do it anyways. On March 21st, a group of hackers going by the name of ‘Turkish Crime Family’ claimed to have access to a large cache of iCloud and other Apple email accounts. The hacker group contacted Vice Blog Motherboard demanding $75,000 in Bitcoin or Ethereum, another form of popular crypto-currency, or $100,000 worth of iTunes gift cards in exchange for deleting the alleged cache of data.

“I just want my money and thought this would be an interesting report that a lot of Apple customers would be interested in reading and hearing,” one of the hackers told Motherboard.

They also shared a screenshot of their communication with Apple security team member and it seemed legit. There was a message in which security team member demanded for a sample of data set. In response, hackers uploaded a YouTube video accessing an old women’s iCloud account. As of now, they claim to have access to 559 million Apple emails and iCloud accounts in total and if their demands are not met, all the user data will be wiped out remotely by April 7.

In response to the threat, Apple contacted Motherboard assuring control of the situation and told: “There have not been any breaches in any of Apple’s systems including iCloud and Apple ID. The alleged list of email addresses and passwords appears to have been obtained from previously compromised third-party services.

We’re actively monitoring to prevent unauthorized access to user accounts and are working with law enforcement to identify the criminals involved. To protect against these type of attacks, we always recommend that users always use strong passwords, not use those same passwords across sites and turn on two-factor authentication.”

Since there was not much evidence proving the claim of hackers, so ZDnet decided to reach out to them. The Turkish Crime Family provided them a small sample of 54 IDs from their alleged 500 million or so. To check the validity of IDs, ZDnet tried contacting people linked with the accounts and found 10 passwords out of 54 were in use at present.

There was nothing common among the 10 verified accounts. The people were using different cellular networks and owned different Apple devices including, iPhones, Macs, iPads. This indicates that the data was not obtained from a particular network and was also not limited to single product line.

Although most of the them used same password for their iCloud account and other services, but there were few who assured that their iCloud password was unique and was not used anywhere else. So, in this case Apple’s statement “obtained from previously compromised third-party services”, might not be completely true.

After all this, one thing is for sure that with the advancement in security measures, hackers too are going a step ahead. It doesn’t matter how the hackers got all those credentials, you should take some measures for your own data security. Anyone with an Apple ID should change their passwords immediately to something that is more secure and complex and enabling two-factor authentication would be a good step. Go ahead and take the measures before something bad happens.