The tinyPod is a case for your Apple Watch, which probably doesn’t sound too exciting on its own. However, its unique angle — a click wheel that controls the watch’s Digital Crown — makes Apple’s wearable look and feel (at least in its marketing) like the company’s first breakthrough product of the 21st century: the iPod. Although you can use it as a music player, it also works with everything else in watchOS, transforming Apple’s smartwatch into a minimalist, distraction-free “phone.”

The $80 tinyPod works with Apple Watch models in Series 4 through 9, along with the Apple Watch SE. (The 41/40mm and 45/44mm Apple Watches have separate tinyPods.) Meanwhile, another 49mm version for the Apple Watch Ultra — because who wouldn’t want to turn their $800 wearable into a minimalist phone? — costs $90. There’s also tinyPod lite, a $30 case sans click wheel.

That click wheel is its core gimmick, and its creator apparently believes it will be safe from Apple’s lawyers. (The fact that it relies on an Apple product probably doesn’t hurt.) The case’s wheel syncs its movement with the Apple Watch’s Digital Crown via “carefully mechanized components inside” that make “direct rotation contact with your Apple Watch crown.” In other words, anywhere on watchOS that lets you scroll with the crown will be scrollable with the tinyPod click wheel. In theory, anyway.

The tinyPod website says it can support multi-day battery life by turning off the watch’s wrist detection (which you don’t need here). But living up to that may be a tall order, given how short the battery life of cellular Apple Watches tends to be when used without a phone in Bluetooth range. Of course, you could use a GPS-only model (or turn off cellular) and stick to locally stored music, but that would also limit what it can do.

tinyPod is the product of Newar, a former Snap designer and one-time jailbreak guru. In May, the creator posted that it began as a side project before being transformed into “a real, shipping product for one reason: Whenever I left the house with it, I loved how I felt.”

Whether the tinyPod lives up to its billing as a minimalist, distraction-free and nostalgia-laden “phone” or not, its creator appears to have put significant thought into aesthetics, clarity of purpose and consistency in marketing. Its website demonstrates an eye for detail that relishes in its iPod inspiration, including era-appropriate Apple fonts and a teaser video in a classic 4:3 aspect ratio. (Cue silhouettes dancing to Gorillaz.)

The tinyPod is available for pre-order ahead of shipments “this summer.” You can reserve one today at the product website.

Source: The tinyPod transforms your old Apple Watch into an iPod-like minimalist phone

Apple Inc (AAPL.O) on Wednesday lost a bid to block a mass London lawsuit worth up to $2 billion which accuses the tech giant of hiding defective batteries in millions of iPhones.

The lawsuit was brought by British consumer champion Justin Gutmann on behalf of around 24 million iPhone users in the United Kingdom.

Gutmann is seeking damages from Apple on their behalf of up to 1.6 billion pounds ($1.9 billion) plus interest, with the claim’s midpoint range being 853 million pounds.

His lawyers argued Apple concealed issues with batteries in certain phone models by “throttling” them with software updates and installed a power management tool which limited performance.

Apple, however, said the lawsuit was “baseless” and strongly denied batteries in iPhones were defective, apart from in a small number of iPhone 6s models for which it offered free battery replacements.

[…]

Source: Mass lawsuit against Apple over iPhone batteries can go ahead, London tribunal rules | Reuters

Users have been reporting that their iPhone 15’s NFC chips were failing after using BMW’s in-car wireless charging, but until now, Apple hasn’t addressed the complaints. That seems to have changed as MacRumors reported this week that an Apple internal memo to third-party repair providers says a software update later this year should prevent a “small number” of in-car wireless chargers from “temporarily” disabling iPhone 15 NFC chips.

Apple reportedly says that until the fix comes out, anyone who experiences this should not use the wireless charger in their car. Users have been complaining about BMW wireless chargers breaking Apple Pay and the BMW digital key feature in posts on Reddit, Apple’s Support community, and MacRumors’ own forums.

BMW seemed to acknowledge the issue early this month when the BMW UK X account replied to a complaint earlier this month saying the company is working with Apple to investigate the issue. There’s no easy way to know which models are affected, so for now, if you have a BMW or a Toyota Supra with a wireless charger, it’s probably best to just avoid using it until the problem is fixed.

Source: Apple says BMW wireless chargers really are messing with iPhone 15s – The Verge

iOS 14.4.2 and iPadOS 14.4.2

Released March 26, 2021

WebKit

Available for: iPhone 6s and later, iPad Pro (all models), iPad Air 2 and later, iPad 5th generation and later, iPad mini 4 and later, and iPod touch (7th generation)

Impact: Processing maliciously crafted web content may lead to universal cross site scripting. Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited.

Description: This issue was addressed by improved management of object lifetimes.

CVE-2021-1879: Clement Lecigne of Google Threat Analysis Group and Billy Leonard of Google Threat Analysis Group

Source: About the security content of iOS 14.4.2 and iPadOS 14.4.2 – Apple Support

You probably don’t need someone to tell you that magnets and life-saving medical devices don’t mix, but Apple wants to make that patently clear. MacRumors has learned that Apple recently updated a support document to warn against keeping the iPhone 12 and MagSafe accessories too close to pacemakers, defibrillators and other implants that might respond to magnets and radios. You should keep them at least six inches away in regular use, or at least a foot away if the iPhone is wirelessly charging.

The company maintained that the extra number of magnets shouldn’t increase the risks compare to past iPhone models. Still, the notice comes days after doctors reported that the new phones could interfere with implants. In a test, they found that an iPhone 12 kicked a defibrillator implant into a suspended state when it got near.

[…]

Source: Apple warns against putting an iPhone 12 too close to your pacemaker | Engadget

BMW’s much-loathed idea to charge owners a subscription fee for Apple CarPlay in its 2019 and 2020 models strikes again, one year after BMW reversed that decision after considerable blowback. Some owners of those cars reported that Apple CarPlay would not work over the weekend, and some were even prompted to pay for the feature, Autoevolution reports.

Some features like CarPlay go through BMW ConnectedDrive Services, which allows users to pair devices, monitor their cars from afar and sign up for additional apps or services. It’s a customer portal, and that’s where some BMW owners whose CarPlay quit working encountered some confusing messages. Bacster007 on Reddit’s r/BMW explained:

“I spoke with my sales rep at the dealership and verified issues are going on. Had me check the customer portal website which has the car and all the information/apps on it. It shows that I’m subscribed to CarPlay. He said for some people who lost the feature it shows that they have to pay for the app all of a sudden, and some like myself are still showing a valid subscription.”

[…]

Source: BMW System Malfunction Takes Out Apple CarPlay, Tells Some Owners to Pay for It

developer relations have hit another sour note. At the company’s hardware event on Tuesday, where it announced new Apple Watch devices and iPads, Apple surprised developers with the news that it would be releasing the updated versions of its major software platforms, iOS 14, iPad OS 14, watchOS 7 and tvOS 14 on September 16, giving them less than a day to prepare.

The unexpected and accelerated timeline left many developers scrambling to ready their apps for App Review and has complicated developers’ plans for the iOS 14 launch day.

Good morning to everyone except Apple Developer Relations.

— josh avant (@joshavant) September 16, 2020

 

Some, like popular podcast player, Overcast, simply informed its users that its planned iOS 14 features won’t be ready.

Others are less forgiving, noting that Apple’s decision to release iOS 14 without looping in the developer community has added, as developer Steve Troughton-Smith put it, “a whole lot of unnecessary stress on developers in an otherwise stressful year.”

In addition, Apple’s decision impacts those developers who choose to wait to support iOS 14.

Typically, developers will often leverage an iOS launch day to promote their apps’ new features via press releases, blog posts and social media. News coverage from app review sites may even include roundups of notable updates to favorite apps, or highlight those apps that have taken advantage of new iOS features in interesting ways.

This year, instead, the developer community can’t worry about chasing press and accolades, as they now have to get their app ready for the iOS 14 update ahead of schedule.

Source: Apple burns developer goodwill with surprise release of iOS 14 | TechCrunch

Over the years, Apple has built up a portfolio of services and add-ons that you pay for. Starting with AppleCare extended warranties and iCloud data subscriptions, they expanded to Apple Music a few years ago, only to dramatically ramp up their offerings last year with TV+, News+, Arcade, and Card. Their services business, taken as a whole, is quickly becoming massive; Apple reported $12.7 billion in Q1 2020 alone, nearly a sixth of its already gigantic quarterly revenue.

All that money comes from the wallets of 480 million subscribers, and their goal is to grow that number to 600 million this year. But to do that, Apple has resorted to insidious tactics to get those people: ads. Lots and lots of ads, on devices that you pay for. iOS 13 has an abundance of ads from Apple marketing Apple services, from the moment you set it up and all throughout the experience. These ads cannot be hidden through the iOS content blocker extension system. Some can be dismissed or hidden, but most cannot, and are purposefully designed into core apps like Music and the App Store. There’s a term to describe software that has lots of unremovable ads: adware, which what iOS has sadly become.

If you don’t subscribe to these services, you’ll be forced to look at these ads constantly, either in the apps you use or the push notifications they have turned on by default. The pervasiveness of ads in iOS is a topic largely unexplored, perhaps due to these services having a lot of adoption among the early adopter crowd that tends to discuss Apple and their design. This isn’t a value call on the services themselves, but a look at how aggressively Apple pushes you to pay for them, and how that growth-hack-style design comes at the expense of the user experience. In this post, I’ll break down all of the places in iOS that I’ve found that have Apple-manufactured ads. You can replicate these results yourself by doing a factory reset of an iPhone (backup first!), installing iOS 13, and signing up for a new iCloud account.

Source: The Paywalled Garden: iOS is Adware – Steve Streza

Two years ago, Desmond Hughes heard so many of his favorite podcasters extolling AirPods, Apple’s tiny, futuristic $170 wireless headphones, that he decided they were worth the splurge. He quickly became a convert.

Hughes is still listening to podcasters talk about their AirPods, but now they’re complaining. The battery can no longer hold a charge, they say, rendering them functionally useless. Apple bloggers agree: “AirPods are starting to show their age for early adopters,” Zac Hall, an editor at 9to5Mac, wrote in a post in January, detailing how he frequently hears a low-battery warning in his AirPods now. Earlier this month, Apple Insider tested a pair of AirPods purchased in 2016 against a pair from 2018, and found that the older pair died after two hours and 16 minutes. “That’s less than half the stated battery life for a new pair,” the writer William Gallagher concluded.

Hughes, who is 35 and lives in Newport News, Virginia, has noticed a similar thing about his own set: At first, their charge lasted five hours, but now they sometimes last only half an hour. He frequently listens to one while charging the other—not optimal conditions for expensive headphones. He’s now gearing up to plunk down more money on another pair. “I just wish they would increase the battery life,” he told me. (On Wednesday, Apple announced it would soon release a new generation of AirPods, but did not say whether the devices would have longer lives.)

The lithium-ion batteries that power AirPods are everywhere. One industry report forecast that sales would grow to $109.72 billion by 2026, from $36.2 billion in 2018. They charge faster, last longer, and pack more power into a small space than other types of batteries do. But they die faster, too, often after just a few years, because every time you charge them, they degrade a little. They can also catch fire or explode if they become damaged, so technology companies make them difficult, if not impossible, for consumers to replace themselves.

The result: A lot of barely chargeable AirPods and wireless mice and Bluetooth speakers are ending up in the trash as consumers go through products—even expensive ones—faster than ever.

Hughes told me that he and his girlfriend upgrade their iPhones every two years, as they do their iPad. “I guess we don’t keep our technology super long,” he told me. And why should he? Every few months, new tech products come out boasting substantial updates and better batteries. A German environmental agency found that the proportion of products sold to replace a defective appliance grew from 3.5 percent in 2004 to 8.3 percent in 2012.

Source: Your AirPods Probably Have Terrible Battery Life – The Atlantic

According to Mic, Reddit user Robert Peterson created a trick using the virtual assistant, Siri, that lowers the phone’s brightness, turns on Do Not Disturb, texts the iPhone owner’s location to an emergency contact and lets them know you have been pulled over by police. The shortcut will also automatically start recording video and, when finished, the phone will send the video to the contact or save it to a cloud service.

The shortcut is available here, while another user created a workflow that automatically reboots the phone, rendering the fingerprint or face ID feature useless until a person enters a passcode. The Washington Post reports that police can’t legally compel a suspect to give up the passcode, although they can force a phone owner to use fingerprint ID or a face scan.

“I noticed in news articles and reports on TV that in many cases, police say one thing happened and the citizen pulled over says something else,” Peterson told Mic. “Sometimes police have body cameras, sometimes not. When they do, the video is not always released in a timely manner. I wanted a way for the person being pulled over to have a record for themselves.”

Source: iPhone Shortcut Automatically Records Police

With iOS 11, Apple added a new setting that lets you choose whether you want previews of your notifications to appear on your lock screen. By default, iOS shows a preview of your notifications only when your phone is unlocked, via some form of authentication like Face ID. But Siri will read your notifications from third-party apps aloud even if your phone is locked. This means anyone with physical access to your phone could hear messages meant just for you. MacMagazine first reported the issue after one of its readers noticed the peculiar behavior.

We tested the issue with some texts and Facebook Messenger exchanges. When my partner pressed the iPhone’s side button and asked Siri to “read my notifications,” the snitch of a voice assistant read the contents of my Facebook Messenger notifications aloud.

However, notifications from Apple’s own Messages app remained properly hidden behind the locked screen, leaving my texts secure. If you ask Siri to read your messages from Apple’s app aloud, you’ll be greeted by Siri telling you to unlock your iPhone if you want those juicy deets.

We’ve reached out to Apple for comment.

Notification contents in iOS 11 are hidden on locked devices by default. With an iPhone X, that means you can look at your phone (or tap the fingerprint sensor on other iOS devices) and watch the contents of your notifications appear. You can edit the option by visiting Settings > Notifications and toggling between the “Always,” “Never,” and “When Unlocked” options, although changing the setting to “Never” does not appear to address the issue. For now, your best bet may simply be to only allow Siri to be activated when your phone is unlocked.

Source: Siri Can Expose Your Hidden Notifications Even When Your Phone Is Locked [Updated]

It turns out Apple’s mobile operating system includes a throttling mechanism for devices with weary batteries, designed to limit CPU utilization in order to prevent peak power demands that the battery is no longer capable of providing. In other words, the OS secretly stalls the CPU on older iPhones to stop them rapidly draining their aging batteries to zero.When the CPU runs slower, though, so do the apps on the device, and some of the iPhone users who experienced this first hand have been wondering why.

Source: Yes, your old iPhone is slowing down: iOS hits brakes on CPUs as batteries wear out • The Register

Apple’s latest version of iOS, namely version 11, may struggle or flat-out fail to connect to Microsoft Office and Exchange mailboxes. That’s a rather annoying pain for anyone working in a typical Windows-based work environment.

The Cupertino idiot-tax operation admitted this week that iOS 11 contains a bug that potentially leaves users locked out of Microsoft Office 365, Outlook.com and Exchange inboxes, and that the mobile OS pops up an alert that reads “Cannot Send Mail. The message was rejected by the server.”

“If your email account is hosted by Microsoft on Outlook.com or Office 365, or an Exchange Server 2016 running on Windows Server 2016, you might see this error message when you try to send an email with iOS 11: ‘Cannot Send Mail. The message was rejected by the server’,” the owner of ClarisWorks claimed.

Source: Attention adults working in the real world: Do not upgrade to iOS 11 if you use Outlook, Exchange

Apple now has a repair program in place to address the so-called “Touch Disease” problem that the iPhone repair community first raised in August. Over time, some iPhone 6 Plus users reported that the touchscreen on the phones became unresponsive, with a flickering gray bar eventually showing up at the top of the screen.

Dubbed Touch Disease by the repair vendor iFixit, the repair was relatively simple, but it required opening up the phone and soldering the two chips that cover the touch responsiveness on the iPhone. Apple Stores and Certified Apple Repair techs didn’t have the equipment for a fix, which led many users paying for more expensive logic board replacements.

Now Apple has an official program in place

Source: Apple Will Fix ‘Touch Disease’ on Your iPhone for Just $150

Apple is blaming touch disease on dropping the phone on hard surfaces, but given the prevalence of the problem, it sounds like it’s shifting the blame, which it has to, considering If you’re having that problem and your phone isn’t cracked or broken, Apple says it will repair it for $150.

Apple’s iCloud has a long and troubled past, but the company keeps pushing it for iPhone and Mac users with every new operating system update. Don’t be fooled. The service is an inconsistent mess and more trouble than it’s worth.

Source: Stop Using iCloud

Microsolderer Jessa Jones can fix practically anything. But these days, she spends most of her time fixing just one thing. Because every single month, more and more iPhone 6 and (especially) 6 Plus devices show up at her shop with the same problem: a gray, flickering bar at the top of the display and an unresponsive touchscreen. And she’s not the only one. Repair pros all over the country are noticing the same trend.
[…]
Replacing the touchscreen doesn’t fix the problem. The gray bar eventually shows up on the new screen, too. Because, according to repair pros, the problem isn’t the screen at all. It’s the two touchscreen controller chips, or Touch IC chips, on the logic board inside the phone.
[…]
Apple’s repair Geniuses aren’t equipped to make specialized repairs to the logic board in-house, so they can’t actually fix Touch Disease. But skilled, third-party microsoldering specialists (most “unauthorized” to do Apple repairs, according to official company policy) can fix phones with symptoms of Touch Disease. And they can do it a whole lot cheaper than the cost of a new logic board or an out-of-warranty phone replacement.
[…]
the most popular theory I heard is that Touch Disease is the unanticipated, long-term consequence of a structural design flaw: Bendgate.

Source: A Design Defect Is Breaking a Ton of iPhone 6 Pluses

According to the complaint, the aggrieved customers say that their AppleCare service plans should allow them to have their devices replaced with new units. The class seeks to represent customers who purchased Apple hardware with the AppleCare replacement plan and then received replacement devices from Apple when their old devices broke.

The claim centers around the plaintiffs’ own definition of “new,” alleging that the only replacements they should have received under their AppleCare replacement plans were in fact brand new hardware, not units that were factory refurbished by Apple.

“The Apple Plans purport to provide consumers with devices that are ‘equivalent to new in performance and reliability.’ What that phrase means is ‘new,’ as refurbished devices can never be the equivalent to new in performance and reliability,” the filing reads.

Source: Tight-wad Apple repair techs swapped our damaged iGear with used kit – lawsuit