Apple to slash royalty payments to GPU designer Imagination by two-thirds

Christian Zibreg ∙ April 19, 2017

As Apple is winding down its supply deal with UK-based GPU designer Imagination Technologies over the next two years, a new report alleges that the Cupertino firm is about to slash payments to Imagination to just one-third of its current royalty rate.

Reuters cited UBS analysts as predicting that Imagination could very easily become a loss-making company by fiscal 2019 without any Apple royalty contributions. The British GPU designer may even have to axe jobs and consider other potential cost-cutting moves in order to weather the storm ahead.

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Chinese government takes issue with live streaming apps on App Store

Christian Zibreg ∙ April 19, 2017

Chinese regulators have taken issue with live-streaming apps that can be downloaded from App Store. As Reuters said Wednesday citing the official Xinhua News Agency, a government body in China’s capital charged with regulating Internet services is planning to “summon” Apple and urge the company to “tighten its checks” regarding live-streaming apps on App Store.

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Apple suppliers prepping to stockpile A11 chips for upcoming iPhones

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated April 25, 2017

Quarterly chip demand for iPhone is predicted to surpass 50 million units in the second half of this year as Apple begins to stockpile next-generation processors and other chips for 2017 iPhones, trade publication DigiTimes said Wednesday. Chip orders should hit a total of between 220 million and 230 million units between the end of the second quarter and the beginning of the third. This implies strong projected demand for the OLED-based iPhone 8 and the iterative LCD-based iPhone 7s and iPhone 7s Plus updates.

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Issues with your Apple Music subscription or iCloud storage? You’re not alone

Christian Zibreg ∙ April 19, 2017

As acknowledged on Apple's System Status webpage, an unknown percentage of Apple Music subscribers have been experiencing issues with their subscriptions since Tuesday, ranging from the inability to download tracks for offline listening to being unable to connect to the service at all.

According to complaints on Reddit, some folks are also being greeted with a “Cannot Connect to iCloud” error message when attempting to upgrade or downgrade their iCloud storage plan.

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iPhone 8 (iPhone 7s?) design drawing shows vertical cameras & Touch ID on the backside

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated April 25, 2017

Apple is testing at least ten different iPhone prototypes and Bloomberg said yesterday that one of the designs being considered features an aluminum back rather than a glass one, and slightly larger dimensions. Today, Australian leakster Sonny Dickson tweeted out an image of what appears to be a technical drawing for an aluminum iPhone 8 prototype (could it instead be an iPhone 7s prototype?) that shows vertically aligned dual cameras and a fingerprint sensor on the backside.

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1984 Apple Macintosh hardware gets emulated in a browser

Christian Zibreg ∙ April 19, 2017

When the original Apple Macintosh system hit the market 33 years ago in 1984, it ignited the personal computer revolution with its built-in black-and-white CRT screen measuring just nine inches diagonally and a mouse-driven graphical user interface. Would you like to try out for yourself how the future of home computing looked like back then? Look no further than Internet Archive's latest in-browser emulation of the classic Macintosh hardware.

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How to save posts on Instagram and organize them into collections

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated April 15, 2019

Instagram recently added a tool that permits you to save posts for later and organize them into Pinterest-like curated collections that only you can see. Whether you want to plan your next day trip, revisit your favorite artists’ illustrations or always have some animal videos on hand, our tutorial will get you up to speed on Instagram's Saved Posts and Collections features and lay out the basics of keeping track of any posts you wish to remember.

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CoolBooter dual-boot utility updated to 1.0b6

Joaquim Barbosa ∙ Updated April 25, 2017

CoolBooter, the dual-boot utility for legacy jailbroken iOS devices, saw an update yesterday, as did its CLI version.

The frontend is now at version 1.0 beta 6, whilst the command line interface, which must be run from a Terminal application, reaches version 0.3.

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CCDataMore adds a cellular data toggle to Control Center

Anthony Bouchard ∙ Updated April 25, 2017

Apple really doesn’t make it easy to toggle cellular data on or off apart from using Airplane Mode. Your only other option is to dig through your Settings app to find the cellular data preference pane, which is intrusive when you're already in another app or doing something else.

Fortunately, a new free jailbreak tweak called CCDataMore by iOS developer Lizynz solves this problem by enabling a cellular data toggle in Control Center.

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Facebook Messenger gaining curated Discover tab

Christian Zibreg ∙ April 18, 2017

Facebook’s annual developers conference, F8, is underway this week and the social networking firm just announced that its mobile Messenger app is gaining a new tab to help users find their recently used bots, nearby places and businesses to message. Titled Discover, the new tab has started to roll out to a few people in the US today ahead of wider availability.

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