Recently Apple announced that developers who make less then $1 million in revenue per year can apply to a reduced App Store charge from 30% to 15%. This seems to be a direct response to Epic Games’ exodus from the App Store and the related lawsuit accusing Apple’s 30% cut and the App Store of being anti-competition. Epic’s fight has been backed by many big names like Spotify and Tile and they have joined together with many other companies to create the Coalition for App Fairness. This seemed to fall on deaf ears at Apple, as they made no big decisions with the App Store following Epic’s lawsuit. This was until two weeks ago on November 18, 2020, when Apple announced that they would reduce the 30% cut to those making less then $1 million per year and would allow 98% of developers to apply according to Sensor Tower, an analytics company. This is big for smaller developers allowing users to sign up for services and buy in-app purchases on the App Store, helping both developers and users. This does not help bigger developers like Epic who have lined their pockets with thousands from App Store purchases, and that seems to be Apple’s design. For years, developers have been trying to fight Apple’s App Store monopoly and the 30% cut, but Epic’s seemed to have the best chance by getting the general user involved. It’s a lot easier to convince people to fight to bring their favorite game back then the complexity of the App Store and anti-trust. This changes with this decision. We have note seen a large outcome, but this could make it difficult for Epic to convince everyone they’re fighting for the small guy who doesn’t have the weight Epic does. This makes it look like Epic’s more in to make more money then fight for fairness in the space. While this could potentially benefit Apple, it also is not really a big risk. The 98% of developers who would qualify for the program only account for about 5% of the App Store’s revenue, leaving the other 95% from big businesses like Epic. If Epic can create the right narrative and show that this decision really makes no difference at Apple, they could retake control of this and push Apple to make more drastic decisions. This decision seems small, but it could affect how apps work for years to come.
Time Flies Apple Event, GoPro, and Oculus Quest 2!
This week has been a crazy release week. We got a bunch of new products and all in a somewhat reasonable price category (all under $600 for base model). This week started off with Apple’s Time Flies event! This event was announced a week before and was expected to include Apple Watch and iPad, not iPhone. This was found to be true and we saw an update to the iPad line and the Apple Watch line. Starting with iPads, we saw two new updates, the iPad 8th generation and the iPad Air. These devices seem really great for the price and I’m excited to see full reviews. Next, we got Apple Watches. We saw two new Apple Watches, the Apple Watch series 6, and the Apple Watch SE, these both include WatchOS 7 and seem very good for the cost. Then today (September 16th) we saw some releases from GoPro and Oculus/Facebook. This will mainly be a recap of the releases, not a review, so I would recommend checking out reviews before purchasing.
iPads
The iPad 8th generation, in base iPad fashion, seems like a great choice for $329. Well I would recommend waiting for full reviews, this doesn’t seem like a big upgrade from the 6th or 7th gen, but as an upgrade from an older iPad or as your first iPad, the iPad product line is again a really great value, especially with everything going virtual. Seems really great!
The iPad Air looks really awesome. It’s the first product announced with Apple’s new A14 class of processor, which we will later see in this year’s release of iPhones. It also adopts a similar design to the iPad Pro 2018 and 2020, but substituting Face ID for the first Touch ID sensor built into a lock button. This looks really awesome at $599 and besides losing ProMotion, LIDAR and Face ID, I think it’s a really good offering for those looking for a step up over the $329 iPad, but don’t want to shell out the money for a iPad Pro.
Apple Watches
The Apple Watch continues to be the the best smart watch, hands down. We got two watches from this event; the series 6, replacing the series 5; and the Apple Watch SE; replacing the series 3. We got the first Apple Watch featuring blood oxygen sensors allow you get to get your oxygen percentage in 15 seconds. This has become more important during the times of COVID and will be adding to Apple’s choke hold on the smart watch industry for fitness enthusiast. The Apple Watch SE adopts the Apple Watch design originally introduced in the series 4, but does not include the EKG, blood oxygen sensors, but does include cellular, GPS, and water resistance. This watch seems like a really good choice for Apple’s newest use case.
During the Time Flies event, Apple also introduced Apple Watch Family Setup. This is Apple’s introduction to kid’s cellular devices (other companies have offered watches, small trackers, walkie-talkies, etc) and might be the prime choice for families in the Apple Ecosystem. This new feature allows you to setup an Apple Watch using one iPhone (belonging to the parent) and will then allow the watch to be used alone without an iPhone connected and allow parents to use iMessage, Find My to keep up with their kids. This does require a cellular Apple Watch, meaning a minimum of $329 for a 40mm Apple Watch SE with cellular and these features will have to be seen in real life. I think this is a great addition, but for $70 more, not including cellular, you can get an iPhone SE, which will make it a tough sell for some.
We also got our first subscription service based on the Apple Watch, Fitness+. These are exercise courses produced by Apple that work with your Apple Watch. This is slated for a October release and will be interesting to see how the Apple Watch can compete with in home classes from other companies like Peleton, or in person from companies like OrangeTheory. They require no special equipment, and have varying degrees of difficulty and required skills. Fitness+ is $9.99/month with 5 member family share, and is also included in the Premier tier of Apple One.
Apple One
Apple One was Apple’s next step in a service focused future. Apple One is a bundle featuring multiple Apple services, for a bundled price. There are three tiers, and all include Music, Arcade, TV+, and some amount of iCloud Storage. Only Family, and Premier can be shared with 5 person family share.
Oculus Quest 2
The Oculus Quest 2 seems like a great new headset, but not a necessary upgrade over the original Quest but with a big catch. You’re being forced to use Facebook account. Oculus was purchased by Facebook in 2014 for 2 Billion and it was recently announced that Facebook accounts would be required for future Oculus products. This was annoying to many, seeming to be a play to gain more data on users or force those who have no Facebook account to make one. This makes the Oculus Quest 2 not the easiest decision. I own a Oculus Quest 1 and it’s awesome, but Facebook makes it harder to decide. If you don’t care about the Facebook part, the Oculus Quest 2 is a great offer for $299 and will give you a really fun experience.
GoPro Hero 9
Last, but not least, we have the GoPro Hero 9. The Hero 9 is the latest offering from GoPro and continues to keep GoPro on top of action cameras. We see an introduction of a front facing screen, borrowed from the DJI Osmo Action, and a bigger design over the Hero 8. This is also the first GoPro to feature 5K recording. This retails for $349 (requiring a purchase of a year of GoPro) or $449. I feel the GoPro Hero 8 or 7 will be a better option for most as it still offers 4K 60, but if you want the front facing display or the 5K recording, GoPro continues to be the best option, as long as you’re willing to spend the price of an iPhone SE or Pixel 4a on an action camera.
Reviews (more to come)
Huawei and US Companies
President Trump recently released an executive order that orders all US-based companies to stop working with the Chinese based company, Huawei Technologies. This has been expected for months after the reports of Huawei working with the Chinese government. This has not been proven yet, but is very likely, since Huawei is Chinese based. This is very bad for Huawei, because they rely on US companies for production of a lot of their products. One of the biggest two are Google and Microsoft. This is very bad, because if they don’t have access to Android or Windows they are going to be very had to sell devices. It’s going to be very had to convince people to pay $1000 for a phone that is currently in Android limbo, or spend $2000 on a laptop that won’t have Windows 10. This is going to leave Huawei in a very interesting state where they will most likely have to create their own software, unless they come up with an agreement with the Trump Administration. Huawei’s future is going to be very intresting.
WWDC 2019
Recently Apple held their World Wide Developer Conference, or WWDC. This is usually where Apple releases their latest versions of iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS and announces some other products. The past WWDC’s have not been very monumental, but this was very different. Apple did some crazy stuff. The first big thing they did was announced a new version of iOS designed specifically for the iPad, named iPadOS. This is one of the first big steps Apple has taken to make the iPad a good laptop replacement. This was cool, but that’s not even close to the end. They announced a ton of features for iOS 13. They added a Dark Mode, AirPods audio sharing, Memoji emoji keyboard, more features for the photos app, easy video editing, Look Around, Handoff to HomePod, Message Announcements on AirPods, and much more. It’s crazy. This was just the software stuff. They also announced a new Mac Pro, that is a crazy powerful machine, and crazy expensive. It’s a real pro machine, something people have been begging Apple to announce for years. To go with your new pro machine they announced a new Apple ProMotion XDR to compete with crazy expensive color grading monitors. It’s all crazy! This year’s WWDC was one of the best WWDC’s in years.
Galaxy Fold: Innovation at the Cost of Reliability
Folding phones may be the future of computing. The ability to have a bigger screen in a smaller footprint is something users are looking for. One of the first folding phones is the Samsung Galaxy Fold. The Galaxy Fold was first seen in November of 2018 as a part of a showcase of Samsung’s “Infinity Flex Displays”. We didn’t get a name or a price, all we got was a showcase of the display tech. Then Samsung went silent for a while and didn’t really give much information. This was until Samsung’s February 2019 Unpacked event where we saw the Galaxy S10, S10e, S10+ and the Galaxy Fold. This was where we learned a name, a release date of April 26th and a starting price of $1980. This was jaw dropping, as it was more expensive then most other flagship phones. People wanted to see this phone and Samsung knew that. So at the beginning of April they started giving out Galaxy Fold sample units to influences to get people excited about folding phones. However, they did this without an embargo, a very interesting choice for Samsung. This means that the second the reviewers got the phone, they could post anything about their Galaxy Fold at any time. This was great for Samsung, as they got a ton of people really excited for folding phones, until the problems started. People started reporting issues with their Galaxy Folds. There were two main issues caused by the same problem. The screen protector that Samsung included is the root of both. The film that is included seems very similar to the film found on other new phones for protection and for shipping, but its not. The film is a required film to protect Samsung’s Infinity Flex Display. The big problem with this is that Samsung didn’t include any message on the film in the sample units given to influences. This made many people believe that it was a screen protector. Marques Brownlee also known as MKBHD on YouTube (youtu.be/MKBHD) and Mark Gurman of Bloomberg (www.bloomberg.com/authors/AS7Hj1mBMGM/mark-gurman) thought it was a screen protector and removed it, causing both of their phones to fail, but they weren’t the only ones. Dieter Bohn of The Verge (www.theverge.com/authors/dieter-bohn) and Steve Kovach of CNBC (twitter.com/stevekovach) both had screen failures without removing the protective layer. This means that you could potentially destroy your almost $2000 phone with a small piece of dust. This is a big problem and has actually caused Samsung to delay the Galaxy Fold and it will now not be released on April 26th. Samsung’s glimpse of the future has not worked out they way they hoped.
AT&T’s Fake 5G is on iPhone
(Image Credit: Screenshot of Apple’s iOS 12.2 release notes)
(Image Credit: Screenshot of a 5Ge logo in the status bar on an iPhone XS)
AT&T’s 5G Evolution or 5Ge is now on iPhone. I covered this a previous post (https://thesoftwareupdate.com/2019/03/08/atts-fake-5g/), but basically AT&T is showing a 5Ge logo when it’s actually LTE Advanced. This was now sent to the iPhone with iOS 12.2. This is currently on iPhone 8 and later, iPad Pro 12.9-inch (3rd Gen) and iPad Pro 11-inch. So, if you have one of those devices you will soon see a 5Ge logo. This is not 5Ge and will not get you faster speeds. This is just a service provider using buzz words to try to trick people in to thinking they are first to mass 5G.
RIP AirPower 2017-2019
Apple’s charging mat is official dead. AirPower was announced in September of 2017 with the iPhone 8, 8 Plus and X. It went alongside Apple’s addition of Qi wireless charging and was supposed to be an easy way to charge your AirPods, iPhone and Apple Watch. The cancelation was brought to us in a statement to TechCrunch, Apple’s senior Vice President of Hardware Enginerring, Dan Riccio, said “After much effort, we’ve concluded AirPower will not achieve our high standards and we have cancelled the project. We apologize to those customers who were looking forward to this launch. We continue to believe that the future is wireless and are committed to push the wireless experience forward.“ Even if you don’t believe in Apple’s business decisions, you can agree that they release high quality products, Apple could have release a terrible product for over $100 and people would buy it, but Apple decide instead to cancel the product then release something that was not up to their standard. They release expensive products, but everyone can agree they are high quality.
Apple Card
(Image Credit: screenshot from Apple’s YouTube channel)
If you asked me what I though Apple was going to release at their March 25th event I never would have said credit card, but they did it. Apple has released their own credit card called Apple Card. I’m not really going to get in to the credit card side of this stuff if you want more of the credit card information like how it stacks up against other credit cards I put a link to The Verge’s article covering that stuff (http://bit.ly/2uCMjN3). I will be talking about digital side of the card. Their are two sides to the Apple Card, the digital side, and the physical card. Similar to many other Apple services, the only way to sign up is using an iPhone. So if you use Android you are sadly out of luck and will not be able to use the Apple Card. Your main way of managing the Apple Card is using the wallet app where you can see your weekly and monthly spending, see what you spent in categories like Shopping or Food and Drink, and pay your bill. There are two ways of paying using the Apple Card. You can either use Apple Pay or Apple’s physical card. One of the main differences of Apple’s physical card compared to other credit card is their are no numbers, no CVV, and no expiration date. If you want to pay for something online you have to use the app to get your credit card number. Which is great for security, but a little annoying. Apple Card will not be available until this summer, but it definitely looks interesting.
Apple Crazy Release Week
This week, Apple realeased a bunch of stuff. Apple really wanted people to pay attention to Apple. Many believe this is because they are finally releasing their streaming service (https://thesoftwareupdate.com/2019/01/14/why-is-every-company-making-a-streaming-service/) and are trying to get people attention. This is a very intresting tactic, that resulted in many of the releases getting buried, so let’s summarize this crazy week. On Monday, Apple released 2 new iPad refreshes. Apple refreshed the iPad Air and the iPad Mini. Both of them now support Apple Pencil, Apple’s $100 stylus. They both are a very intresting addition to Apple’s iPad lineup and now fill gaps between the iPad Pro and the $329 iPad. Tuesday, we got a refresh to the iMac line and the addition of a $3,200 worth of 256GB of DDR4 ECC Ram for the top of the line iMac Pro. This was not too big, but great for people who use iMac. This was all wrapped up on Wednesday when we got what everyone was excited for: AirPods 2nd generation. This is the 2nd generation version of the very popular AirPods, Apple’s fully wireless earbuds. They add wireless charging, Apple’s new W1 chip, and “Hey Siri” support. This gives you a couple options. If you have a pair of 1st generation AirPods, you can add wireless charging with the purchase of Apple’s $80 wireless charging case. This was a very non Apple decision giving people the ability to upgrade their AirPods if they just want the wireless charging. If you don’t have a pair of AirPods, or you really want the new features. You can get AirPods 2nd generation without wireless charging for $159 or with wireless charging for $200. This week did not include the release of AirPower (https://thesoftwareupdate.com/comi/2018/10/05/apple-airpower/), or Apple’s streaming service, but it definitely seems like Apple is gearing up to release some new stuff, and I can’t wait to see.
WWDC19 Dates Announced
(Image Credit: Image included in the email Apple sent)
Today, Apple finally sent out the announcement for their Worldwide Developer Conference or WWDC. WWDC19 will be on June 3-7 in San Jose, CA and had an interesting theme in the email. Apple keeps everthing they announce very secured, so we don’t know exactly what they will be announcing, but we expect iOS 13, macOS 10.15, watchOS 6, and tvOS 13. People also believe Apple will announce AirPower, AirPods 2, an upgradable Mac Pro, and many other rumors, but often Apple rumors are very off, so you will have to take them with a grain of salt. Even though I have no idea what Apple will be announcing, I am really excited to see what Apple brings to WWDC19.
The Software Update 