Apple Loop: Frustrating iOS Bug Returns, iPhone 6S Removing Popular Feature, More Apple Music Anger.
For those daring users who have been running Apple’s iOS 9 Public Beta on their iOS devices, a little bit of relief is arriving in the form of an update to iOS 9 Public Beta 2. Taking a look back at another week of news from Cupertino, this week’s Apple Loop includes Apple’s quarterly results, the new iPhones lacking the popular 16 GB option, the design changes in the iPhone 6S Plus, a review of the iPod Touch, a look at who would buy the Touch, Apple cloud services going down, Anandtech’s review of the Apple Watch, sales figures around the wearable, and Jim Dalrymple’s rejection of Apple Music.It is still a mystery which fixes will be carried by the iOS 8.4.1, but there is the possibility that the Cupertino-based company might end up with a security patch that would nullify the iOS 8.4 jailbreak. Launched a few days ago, the beta update appears to be slowly rolling out to users—at least, it took us until this morning to gain access to the update. Apple Loop is here to remind you of a few of the very many discussions that have happened around Apple over the last seven days (and you can read our weekly digest of Android news here on Forbes).
After promising to fix the functionality stripped from iOS 8.4 in iOS 9, Apple’s iPhone, iPad and iPod touch software has now been hit by an old foe… WiFried is back with a vengeance. Apple released its Q3 2015 numbers this week, and it shows a company at the top of its game. iPhone sales reached 47.5 million, Mac sales went up to 4.7 million, and the quarterly profit was $10.7 billion. The bug makes any form of Internet access a nightmare by repeatedly dropping WiFi connections and slowing speeds to a crawl and Apple Support Communities has now started receiving WiFried complaints from frustrated users running iOS 8.4.
The latest iOS 9 packs in it a host of new features, including a change in font from Helvetica Neue to San Francisco and a long-awaited keyboard correction where the alphabets are in lower case by default and turning on the shift key now changes the colour of the arrow for better understanding. Jordan Kahn picked out a few highlights over on 9to5Mac: …the company’s revenue in China is up 112%, it returned $13 billion to shareholders through its capital return program, and it sold a record number of iPhones and Macs during the quarter.
This is bad news for Apple since the main WiFried Communities thread now has over one million views, more than 3,000 replies and comments span beyond 200 pages. The iTeam Can now Permanently factory IMEI unlock your iPhone 6,5S, 5C, 5,4S with jailbreak iOS 8.4 or 8.3 and get Cydia Installed by whitelisting your IMEI in the Apple iTunes database. The company, citing its own research, noted that users switching from Android to iPhone was at an all-time high, while giving us some insight into Apple Watch usage. You might remember a similar wave of complaints after iPhone owners woke up to find a meaty iOS update had landed a Watch app on their phones, regardless of whether they owned or wanted to own or had even heard of Apple’s shiny new $350-$17,000 accessory.
In fact WiFried has become so frustrating to many users after iOS 8 update after iOS 8 update failed to fix it that it has even spawned dedicated websites. Smart and observant writer folk rightly called out Apple’s “junk drawer” problem, their increasingly overstuffed iPhone folders labeled “Apple Crap.” Let’s think about this from Apple’s perspective for a minute. For all of the product lines, Apple still relies on the iPhone to drive the company, as Forbes’ Steve Schaefer points out: That wasn’t enough to match the Street’s high expectations of over 48 million phones sold though.
It’s not hard to imagine why it might want to highlight its own wares, in the same way you don’t wonder why Legoland doesn’t feature a “World o’ K’Nex” installation. And, if you’re a photo junkie, Apple has fixed the beta-testing bug that previously prevented you from using your device’s volume buttons to snap pictures. With the launch of iOS 8.3 in April, Apple finally acknowledged WiFried’s existence for the first time (it was the ninth version of iOS 8) and listed a fix: It was far from perfect – many users still reported the problem remained after upgrading (in itself a torturously slow process for affected WiFried users) – but it was start. It’s just good business. “Music, Photos, anything that ties into the cloud, all of these things are ecosystem plays,” explains Forrester mobile analyst Michael Facemire. “We’ve seen that just having a good device isn’t good enough in mobile… For Apple to maintain its stranglehold on the markets it enjoys, the higher-end markets, it needs to make sure it has that complete ecosystem buy-in.” It’s true that Apple has the strongest (though not the largest, thanks to legions of perfectly decent, inexpensive Android device) smartphone and tablet ecosystem in the world. This actually gives a very small time frame for avid iOS fans and prospective jailbreakers to safeguard the possibility of jailbreaking, even after future iOS updates.
Given the massive impact of iPhone on Apple’s results — it accounted for 63.2% of quarterly revenue — it makes sense to assume that expectations for smartphone sales are primary factor in the company’s earnings and revenue forecasts. Getting iPhone owners to use Music instead of Spotify, or Apple Maps instead of Google Maps, is a hypothetically terrific way to ensure that dominance continues. Similarly, anyone also running the OS X public beta should have either received a new version to download or will be receiving one very soon, and it’ll match the contents of the fourth version of the OS X El Capitan beta that developers get. While the images of the new iPhone circuitry previously leaked carried just 16 GB of storage (which, while a popular seller, isn’t enough room to swing a digital cat), the latest indication is that the lower tier of the iPhone will be 32GB, with 64GB and 128GB filling the typical triplet line-up. The iOS beta update can be downloaded via iTunes—for those who already have the first public beta installed on their devices—or as an over-the-air update.
Apple Maps, which arrived on millions of iPhones in 2012, was so outrageously bad that Apple CEO Tim Cook penned a public apology (since deleted from Apple’s web site) that included the unthinkable act of suggesting iOS users rely on a competitor instead: “While we’re improving Maps, you can try alternatives by downloading map apps from the App Store like Bing, MapQuest and Waze, or use Google or Nokia maps by going to their websites and creating an icon on your home screen to their Web app.” Apple Music, the latest size-14 first-party footprint to land on iPhones and iPads, isn’t nearly the same category of trainwreck as Maps. There is an option in the Settings app that lets users turn off a feature which allows them access Apple Pay from the home button with a double click. Amit Chowdhry covers the story: Apple is reportedly dropping the 16GB option for iPhones when the “iPhone 6s” is released this September, according to sources with Made In China Gadget(MICGadget). Users will also get their hands on the new and improved iOS camera that will now allow users to use the volume buttons as shutter buttons when taking pictures.
Stalwart Apple advocate and editor of the Loop Jim Dalrymple called Music “a nightmare” this week, after it gobbled up 4,700 songs from his music collection; he’s going back to Spotify. “Nightmare” was also the pejorative of choice for iOS developer Cezary Wojcik, who wrote a lengthy breakdown of Music’s usability, or lack thereof. It’s unclear just how many more versions of the public beta Apple might release before then, but if you want to get in on the preview fun, just sign up here. This is taking off your sock and chirping “Look at my gout!” And because users can’t delete it, for many it’s just a constant reminder of that thing Apple tried once that they didn’t particularly like. “Let’s say everybody buys into Facebook Messenger and leaves iMessage out of the loop,” says Facemire, describing what Apple’s undeletable apps are safeguarding against. “All of a sudden that’s a crack in Apple’s ecosystem that’s very hard to get back.
Once you have that crack, one or two more cracks, now I don’t need an iPhone anymore.” All of which makes a strong case in favor of preloading apps. Future Supplier speculates this is to provide a new speaker, though Apple is also expected to cram in a Force Touch sensor, upgraded 13MP camera module and more powerful A8X chipset. Respected KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo previously stated Apple will move both new iPhones to a harder 7000 Series aluminium which is alloyed with zinc to produce one of the strongest aluminium alloys possible (tensile strength up to 700 MPa). If I’m pushed toward Music and find it unbearable though, I get closer to thinking an iPhone—or at the very least, anything iCloud-related—is something I might not even want.
Just over 3GB, which combined with how much room iOS itself takes (and the vagaries of measuring storage capacity) left him with just over 8GB of usable space on a 16GB iPad Mini. All of this is space that could be going toward photos, or videos, or games, or comics, or any of a hundred other experiences that iPhone and iPad owners actually want. “You don’t want to become like Acer, or any of those companies, where any time you bought one of their PCs the first thing you saw was 800 things that were installed on there, taking up space,” says Facemire. “At 16GB, for the lower-end iPhone and iPad, that’s a valuable commodity.” One answer would be “just don’t buy a 16GB device,” which is true enough, but Apple still sells them without offering any caveats.
The question becomes, then, when do our Apple Crap folders suck up so much oxygen that we can’t just ignore them anymore? “I would contend that the point is probably here,” says Facemire. “There can’t be another Music that comes out, that’s for sure. Until we get to a space where network connectivity is ubiquitous, and I don’t have to store anything at all locally, the space that’s already taken up is about the max that I would want to continue.” But why would anyone expect that sort of restraint?
Apple does clearly put thought into the apps it preloads, though, in a way that’s somehow more galling. iPad owners, for instance, aren’t saddled with Watch, or Calculator, or Stocks, or Compass, or a handful of other in-house apps, presumably because they don’t fit the imagined tablet use case (and don’t, importantly, feed into iCloud). While you can’t delete them, even the most entrenched Android apps can be easily disabled, locked down to their smallest form and blocking any future updates.
With any luck, though, we’re nearing a point where Apple finally asks itself how much intractability is really worth, and how much it ultimately costs.