Five ways to make the most of a file manager on jailbroken iOS

The vast majority of non-developers who jailbreak do it for the tweaks, and use Cydia almost exclusively to find, maintain, and update them.

However, jailbreaking your device brings much more than the ability to install tweaks; its real power lies in granting unfettered access to the filesystem, which allows you to make almost any change you like.

In this article, I’ll go through five of the most interesting and ubiquitous uses for file managers on iOS.

Here’s a special tool Apple uses to recover data from MacBook Pro’s non-removable SSD

iFixit's teardown analysis of both the 13 and 15-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar has found a non-removable SSD inside soldered to the logic board. In contrast, non-Touch Bar Pros use a removable PCIe-based SSD, simplifying upgrades.

iFixit discovered that Touch Bar Pros include a hidden connector on the logic board that leads nowhere which, as reported by 9to5Mac, works in conjunction with a special tool to let service technicians rescue data in case of a hardware failure.

Apple has stopped disclosing how much it spends on advertising

Apple has stopped disclosing how much it spends on advertising, as revealed in its annual report (10-K) filed with the United States Securities and Exchange (SEC) commission in October.

Apple's motives behind this move are unclear and the SEC filing makes no mention of its advertising expenses for the whole 2016. In 2015, Apple's ad spend rose fifty percent to a record $1.8 billion.

The decision to stop reporting how much it spends on advertising may have something to do with the fact that the iPhone maker ended 2016 with its lowest operating margin since 2009, partially due to spending more ad dollars to drive total revenue.

Ottm is a stunning hardwood wrist band for your Apple Watch

Back in March, a really sweet Indiegogo campaign for a trio of Apple Watch wrist bands made completely of wood dubbed Ottm was announced, and now the first units are making their way from the production line over to the hands of consumers.

We've finally got ours after months of waiting, and we've excited to show you what we think about them.

Open source Darwin code for macOS 10.12 Sierra now available

Apple today released open-source Darwin code for macOS 10.12 Sierra, 9to5Mac reports. Darwin, for those unfamiliar with it, forms the core set of Unix components upon which macOS, iOS, watchOS and tvOS are based, including drivers and the unencrypted kernel along with its BSD portions.

Apple typically releases Darwin code shortly after major macOS releases, and Sierra is no exception. Anyone interested in the intricacies of Sierra's inner workings can now grab a copy of Darwin via this direct download link.

10.5-inch iPad Pro rumored to target education and enterprise markets

Apple may position its rumored new 10.5-inch iPad Pro model as the go-to tablet in the education and enterprise markets, if a report Tuesday in DigiTimes is anything to go by. The Taiwanese trade publication learned from Asian supply chain makers that the Cupertino firm's decided to add a new screen size to the lineup because existing 9.7-inch models proved too small and the 12.9-inch iPad Pro too expensive for business users and students.

Rumor: Apple working with LG on dual cameras for iPhone with 3D photography features

A future iPhone could enhance the iPhone 7 Plus's depth-of-field Portrait photography mode with all-new “3D photographing” features, according to a new report Thursday from The Korea Economic Daily. The outlet is reporting that the Cupertino firm has teamed up with LG Innotek on a next-generation dual-camera module with 3D photography features, likely to be used in select 2017 iPhone models.

Apple’s Black Friday deals are about gift cards, exclude latest products

Apple has launched its Black Friday deals today in Australia and New Zealand through its online store and retail locations in both countries ahead of similar one-day deals scheduled to launch in other markets tomorrow. The one-day shopping event in Australia and New Zealand offers customers free Apple Store gift cards worth up to A$200 or NZ$215 with the purchase of certain products like select models of the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac and Apple TV.

How to prevent partitions from mounting when you boot up, log in, or connect drives to your Mac

With the exception of partitions in unreadable formats and certain hidden partitions such as EFI and Recovery HD, the default behaviour of macOS is to mount all partitions of a drive on boot-up, login, or on connecting an external drive.

Whilst this behaviour is useful for the novice or for those connecting a single USB stick to copy some files, it can become unwieldy and even annoying if you have many multi-partitioned drives attached to your Mac.

For example, my desktop Hackintosh has three internal drives, each with at least two partitions, and one of these drives is not even needed when booted under macOS – it is for Windows 10 and Linux. Add to this a couple of external hard drives with partitions for storage, OS installers and Time Machine backups for other computers, and your desktop and Finder sidebar can begin to look a real mess. It also takes time for the drives to mount on every boot and unmount on sleep or shutdown.

This guide will detail how to ensure only the drives of your choosing mount automatically, leaving the rest unmounted within macOS.