According to sources briefed on new specifications that Apple shared with vendors in its Made for iOS (MFi) licensing program, the latest iPhone 11 models could soon support new kinds of third-party strobe and flash accessories that sync with the iPhone’s camera shutter button.
Your iPhone’s rear-facing LED camera flash becomes an excellent makeshift flashlight in a pinch, but have you ever glanced at your handset’s battery level after accidentally leaving your LED flash turned on? I have… and it wasn’t pretty.
With a newly-released jailbreak tweak dubbed OhMyFlash by iOS developer NoisyFlake, you can prevent this from happening. The tweak implements a customizable timeout period, after which your iPhone’s rear-facing flash is automatically turned off.
Your iPhone photography gets a serious leg up with the LIT Flash, a handheld Xenon flash that puts powerful, studio-quality lighting in your hand that you can shape to your liking.
If you purchased your 13-inch MacBook Pro without Touch Bar between June 2017 and June 2018 and it exhibits SSD issues, including data loss and drive failure, you're not alone.
The most lucrative iPhone feature is storage—Apple makes an estimated $218 more profit per iPhone XS or iPhone XS Max unit versus the base models with 64 gigabytes of storage.
Samsung Electronics on Monday disclosed plans to invest $7 billion over the next three years to expand its flash memory chip production in China’s northwestern city of Xi’an.
Flash's demise continues unabated with yesterday's news that its maker Adobe will be winding down development and distribution of the Flash plugin and related software at the end of 2020.
Acknowledging that most browser vendors today are integrating capabilities once provided by the resource-hungry Flash and Shockwave plugins directly into their browsers and deprecating plugins, Adobe's confirmed it's now planning to end-of-life Flash.
“Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to the open formats” such as HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly, reads Adobe's statement.
The company will continue issuing regular security patches through the end of 2020 to maintain compatibility while adding features and capabilities “as needed”.
So, how does this affect you?
Folks who regularly visit websites that have migrated from Flash to open web standards shouldn’t notice much difference. If a website continues to use Adobe's plugin, and you give it explicit permission to run Flash, it will continue working through the end of 2020.
Apple wrote on its WebKit blog that for its users the transition from Flash began in 2010 when Flash was no longer pre-installed on Macs. “Apple is working with Adobe, industry partners and developers to complete this transition,” wrote the iPhone maker.
Flash Player poses a major security risk due to a bunch of vulnerabilities that expose your Mac to malware and other attacks. Thankfully, you can safely remove Flash Player from your computer because most websites do not use it anymore.
TUTORIAL: How to remove Adobe Flash from your Mac
Apple reminded developers that Safari's WebKit rendering engine features a number of modern technologies for interactive experiences that don't require a plugin, like:
HTML Video and Media Source Extensions support a wide range of video experiences, including short clips, longer content and live streaming. HTML Canvas and WebGL provide fast, dynamic graphics for games and interactive experiences. CSS Transitions and Animations add polished animations to web interfaces. WebRTC enables real-time peer-to-peer video. WebAssembly allows games and other compute-intensive applications to run faster.Facebook said it's working with its partners to come up with a migration path for developers that use Flash to power their games on Facebook.
Google said that three years ago, 80 percent of desktop Chrome users visited a site with Flash each day. Today, usage is only 17 percent and continues to decline, the search giant added.
Microsoft called it the end of an era, saying it will gradually phase out Flash support across its Edge and Internet Explorer browsers ahead of the cutoff date. The process began already for Edge with Click-to-Run for Flash in Windows 10 Creators Update.
And finally, browser maker Mozilla has updated its published roadmap for Flash in Firefox.
“Starting next month, users will choose which websites are able to run the Flash plugin,” it said. Flash will be disabled by default “for most users” of the Firefox browser in 2019.
“In order to preserve user security, once Flash is no longer supported by Adobe security patches, no version of Firefox will load the plugin,” reads Mozilla's blog post.
Flash's death couldn't have come sooner: for 20 years, Adobe's proprietary plugin has powered games, videos and apps on the web, sending our notebook's fans into overdrive and contributing greatly to the battery drain. Safari on macOS Sierra and later disables the Flash plugin by default, requiring explicit approval on each website before running Flash.
The fact that Flash was never supported by iOS, the world's most popular operating system, has certainly helped doom Adobe's software and hasten its demise, especially given the size and appealing demographics of iOS users.
Apple's late co-founder Steve Jobs famously disparaged Adobe's technology back in April 2010 via his highly controversial open letter, innocently titled “Thoughts on Flash”.
Steve's letter, still available on Apple's website, was in response to Adobe’s public criticism of Apple for omitting the technology from its iOS products. It sent the stubborn Photoshop maker through the roof, prompting it to port the Flash Player to the rival Android platform.
Six years ago, Adobe stopped developing Flash Player for Android.
I'm sure that somewhere Apple's late co-founder is grinning from ear to ear.
Apple's upcoming iPhone models—the OLED-based iPhone 8 and the iterative LCD-based iPhone 7s and iPhone 7s Plus handsets—have been hit in a global shortage of 3D NAND flash chips, forcing the Cupertino giant to call on Samsung in an effort to secure more.
According to a new report Thursday from DigiTimes, the overall supply of 3D NAND flash components for 2017 iPhones has fallen short of Apple's orders by as much as thirty percent.
That's because the company's current flash chip suppliers SK Hynix and Toshiba have both experienced lower-than-expected yield rates for their 3D NAND technologies.
SK Hynix is among the bidders for Toshiba’s lucrative flash chip unit.
Here's an excerpt from the DigiTimes report:
Apple has turned to Samsung for more NAND chip supplies for its upcoming phones, since Samsung has relatively stable yield rates for 3D NAND technology and has scaled up its output of 3D NAND chips.
TrendForce estimated that supplies of the 3D NAND flash storage chip won't ease until the middle of 2018. “The NAND Flash industry’s manufacturers will continue to devote their attention to the development of 3D 64L NAND Flash technology in 2017,” said TrendForce.
In the second half of 2018, some suppliers will also begin to shift their attention towards the industry’s newer and more advanced 96L flash storage products. Samsung, Toshiba and Micron Technology are currently transitioning to 64-layer 3D NAND flash products, while SK Hynix plans to jump straight to supplying 72-layer 3D chips.
“These gradual changes are all expected to have a potentially beneficial effect on the productions of NAND Flash in 2018,” added TrendForce. “As a result, their prices could start to fall as early as next year”. However, the global supply of NAND flash chips is set to remain tight through the end of 2017.
Business Korea said that Samsung Electronics (which leads the global NAND flash market), Toshiba, Western Digital and SK Hynix are accelerating the development of these three-dimensional NAND flash chip technologies, which basically stack more memory cells than 2D chips while utilizing existing mass production facilities.
The 128GB iPhone 7 model, for example, uses Toshiba’s 3D BiCS NAND technology, which stores three bits of data per transistor and stacks 48 NAND layers onto a single die, bringing accelerated read and write performance compared to 2D flash memory chips.
Having put its memory-chip business on sale a few months ago, Japanese giant Toshiba said today that it has selected the consortium of Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, Bain Capital Private Equity and Development Bank of Japan as its preferred bidder.
According to DigiTimes, the aforementioned government-led consortium has presented the best proposal in terms of valuation, certainty of closing, retention of employees and maintenance of sensitive technology within Japan.
The definite agreement should be confirmed on June 28, when the consortium is scheduled to hold its shareholder meeting. The transaction, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approval, should close by March 2018.
Toshiba's memory semiconductor business was split from the parent company on April 1, 2017 as a wholly-owned subsidiary. Toshiba is among Apple's key suppliers of flash memory chips.
Apple supplier SK Hynix unveiled 72-layer, 256-gigabit (Gb) 3D NAND flash memory chips based on triple-level cell arrays. By stacking 1.5 times more cells than the company's previous 48-layer technology, a single 256Gb NAND flash chip can represent 32 gigabytes of storage with two times faster internal operation speed and twenty percent faster read/write performance than a 48-layer 3D NAND chip.
DigiTimes estimated this week that flash memory chips for smartphones will remain in high demand throughout 2017 because supply shortages are reportedly “worse than expected” as chip makers are currently transitioning from older 2D NAND to newer 3D NAND technology.
According to a report Friday in The Korea Herald newspaper, citing Mirae Asset Daewoo Securities analysts, Toshiba may spin off of its lucrative NAND flash unit and sell the stake to Western Digital, narrowing the technology and market share gap with its bigger rival Samsung Electronics.
It's been a little more than two weeks since Photoshop maker Adobe released a security update for its Flash Player for macOS which fixed a bunch of critical vulnerabilities and now another critical security update for Flash Player got released this morning. According to Adobe, the vulnerabilities in the current version of Flash Player could allow an attacker to take control of Mac, Windows, Linux and Chrome OS machines.