A new rumor Friday from the Korea Economic Daily, citing an unnamed source in the chemical industry, alleges that Apple has chosen LG subsidiary LG Chem as an exclusive supplier of L-shaped two-cell batteries for next year's iPhone model, tentatively named “iPhone 9”.
Last year, I shared a roundup of my favorite accessories for my 2015 15-inch MacBook Pro. Times have since changed, and I was recently convinced to pick up a new 2017 15-inch MacBook Pro.
In this piece, I’ll pick up where I left off in my previous post by going over additional accessories that I consider essentials for my 2017 MacBook Pro. Worthy of note, these should all work with the 2016 MacBook Pro too.
Apple's 5.8-inch iPhone 8 is expected to ship with a stronger ten-watt power adapter in its box, featuring a USB-C connector and fast-charging support. That's according to Barclays analyst Blayne Curtis's note to clients Wednesday, a copy of which was obtained by MacRumors.
Current iPhones include a five-watt power adapter in the box.
The analyst claims that iPhone 8 will include a dedicated USB-C Power Delivery chip that enables fast charging capabilities. The new ten-watt power adapter will also sport an integrated USB-C Power Delivery chip. Both chips will be supplied by Cypress Semiconductor and it's basically the same CYPD2104 part used in Apple's new 10.5-inch iPad Pro.
It should be noted that iPhone 7 already supports fast-charging capability when connected to Apple's 29-watt USB-C power adapter for MacBook via a Lightning to USB-C cable.
The new 12.9-inch iPad Pro and the 10.5-inch iPad Pro are capable of fast charging, too.
KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said in March that the OLED-based iPhone 8 would retain its Lightning connector and have a dedicated USB-C Power Delivery chip on the logic board.
Assuming Curtis is right, iPhone 8 might come bundled with either a Lightning to USB-C cable or a female USB-C to male USB-A adapter with an integrated fast-charging chip so that customers could use their existing Lightning to USB cable to fast-charge the phone.
iPhone 8 concept courtesy of iFanr.
Any time you plug your locked iOS device into a power source, a full-screen charging view with a large battery icon and the percentage you have remaining appears. It’s a simple UI, but one jailbreak developer thought they could do better.
A new jailbreak tweak dubbed Charge by iOS developer Mr Smith, supercharges your Lock screen’s charging view with a bevy of aesthetically-pleasing features. Not only does it provide a dreamy interface for minimalists, but it offers more information at a glance than the stock interface does.
A new free jailbreak tweak called BatteryBanners by iOS developer Cole Cabral lets you summon a banner notification on demand via Activator that displays a numeric battery level percentage.
While the Status Bar already has a battery icon and iOS can be configured to display the numeric battery level percentage right beside it, this tweak lets you disable the feature while still letting you get to battery information when you need it.
The FaceTime app on your iPhone exhibits a blurred silhouette of yourself via your device's front-facing camera any time you're in the app. It’s an interesting aesthetic effect, but it’s a waste of battery and a deterrent for camera-shy people.
A new free jailbreak tweak called NoBlurFrontCamera by CydiaGeek officially lets you disable this effect, replacing it with a simple dark background.
Samsung's top-of-the-line Galaxy handsets are typically outfitted with some of the best-performing batteries. That said, you could imagine our surprise when we learned that the battery in Samsung's flagship Galaxy S8+ performed worse than the cell powering Apple's iPhone 7 Plus, as per a new test carried out by review website PhoneArena.
Repair experts over at iFixit tore apart Apple's new iPad with a brighter 9.7-inch screen. What they discovered doesn't come as surprise: the canonical iPad is basically an original four-year-old iPad Air with a more repairable screen and some new jewelry in the form of Touch ID, Apple Pay, Apple's homegrown third-generation 64-bit A9 chip with the embedded M9 motion coprocessor and other minor updates.
Unfortunately, the device's A9 processor is outfitted with two gigabytes of RAM. iPhone 6s's A9 chip has two gigabytes of RAM as well, just like iPad Air 2's A8X chip, so this may not be that big of a deal. On the other hand, it's a letdown considering iPhone 7 Plus is rocking three gigabytes of RAM.
Lots of people take their battery life seriously, and it goes without saying that Apple provides the bare minimum of battery health and information tools; it has often been up to jailbreak developers to fill in these gaps.
A new jailbreak tweak release called Zeal by iOS developers Rabih M. and Stijn aims to answer all the cries from battery sticklers that have yet to be answered by Apple. It provides both an informative battery management interface that you can invoke on demand to see more about how your battery is doing and conserve power.
If you use Low Power Mode to save power when your battery percentage gets too low for comfort, but hate how cumbersome it is to turn the feature on, then a new free jailbreak tweak called QuickPowerMode by Olxios&Nico should be the next thing you install on your jailbroken iPhone.
This tweak makes it easier to toggle Low Power Mode. With it, all you have to do is tap on the battery icon in your Status Bar, and this turns the feature on or off.
Battery packs are a hot commodity these days because it seems like our mobile devices never want to last as long as we’d like them to. They bring us out of the dark ages, where we used to have to sit by a power outlet and wait for our handsets to charge, and are advantageous because they allow you to charge on the go, no matter how far away from civilization you might be.
On the other hand, people who are always on the go have a tendency of misplacing things, and sometimes that means losing their battery packs. That’s why Nomad came up with the PowerPack, a trackable battery pack you can keep tabs on with your mobile device, even when you’ve forgotten it somewhere or misplaced it.
Apple on Thursday announced that the recently-released iOS 10.2.1 addresses the unexpected shutdown issues plaguing some iPhone models. In a statement to TechCrunch the company said the software, which was seeded to users late last month, has reduced the issues in iPhone 6 and 6s models by as much as 80%.